ATLANTA (AP) — He is weighing military action against Iran, leading an aggressive immigration crackdown, and teasing a federal takeover of state elections.
But on Thursday, President Donald Trump's team insists he will focus on the economy when he visits battleground Georgia in a trip designed to help boost Republicans' political standing heading into the high-stakes midterm elections.
“Georgia is obviously a very important state to the president and to the Republican Party,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on the eve of his visit. Trump’s remarks in Georgia, she said, will highlight “his efforts to make life affordable for working people."
Trump's destination in Georgia suggests he has something else on his mind too. He's heading to a congressional district previously represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former supporter who resigned in January after feuding with Trump. There's a special election to replace her on March 10.
The White House has long said Trump would focus more on the economy, and he frequently complains that he doesn't get enough credit for it. But recent months have been dominated by other issues, including deadly clashes during deportation efforts in Minneapolis.
As a reminder of his divided attention, Trump is scheduled to begin Thursday with one of his passion projects. He's gathering representatives from some of the more than two dozen countries that have joined his Board of Peace, a diplomatic initiative to supplant the United Nations.
The Georgia visit comes less than a month after federal agents seized voting records and ballots from Fulton County, home to the state’s largest collection of Democrats.
Trump has long seen Georgia as central to his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats and President Joe Biden, a fabrication that he reiterated Wednesday during a White House reception on Black History Month.
“We won by millions of votes but they cheated,” Trump said.
Audits, state officials, courts and Trump’s own former attorney general have all rejected the idea of widespread problems that could have altered the election.
Some Republicans are now pushing for Georgia’s State Election Board, which has a Trump-aligned majority, to take control of elections in Fulton County, a step enabled by a controversial state law passed in 2021. But it’s unclear if or when the board will act.
Leavitt, in the White House, said Wednesday that Trump was “exploring his options” when it comes to a potential executive order he teased on social media over the weekend designed to address voter fraud.
Trump described Democrats as “horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS” in the post, which is pinned to the top of his social media account. He also said that Republicans should feature such claims “at the top of every speech.”
Leavitt, meanwhile, insisted Trump would be focusing on affordability and the economy.
Trump may be distracted by fresh attacks from Greene, once among the president's most vocal allies in Congress and now one of his loudest conservative critics.
In a social media post ahead of Trump's visit, Greene noted that the White House and Republican leaders met earlier in the week to develop an effective midterm message. She suggested they were “on the struggle bus" and blamed them for health insurance costs that ballooned this year.
“Approximately 75,000 households in my former district had their health insurance double or more on January 1st of this year because the ACA tax credits expired and Republicans have absolutely failed to fix our health insurance system that was destroyed by Obamacare,” she said. “And you can call me all the petty names you want, I don’t worship a man. I’m not in a cult.”
Early voting has already begun in the special election to replace Greene, and the leading Republican candidates have fully embraced Trump.
Trump recently endorsed Clay Fuller, a district attorney who prosecutes crimes in four counties. Fuller described Trump’s endorsement as “rocket fuel” for his candidacy in a weekend interview and vowed to maintain an America First agenda even if he remains in Congress after Trump is no longer president.
Other candidates include Republican former state Sen. Colton Moore, who made a name for himself with a vociferous attack on Trump’s prosecution in Georgia. Moore, the favorite of many far-right activists, said he’s been in communication with Trump even after Trump endorsed Fuller, calling the choice “unfortunate.”
“I think he’s the greatest president of our lifetimes,” Moore said.
The top Democrat in the race is Shawn Harris, who unsuccessfully ran against Greene in 2024. Democrats voice hope for an upset, but the district is rated as the most Republican district in Georgia by the Cook Political Report.
President Donald Trump gestures during a Black History Month event in the East Room of the White House, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)
GENEVA (AP) — A "campaign of destruction" in October by Sudanese paramilitary forces against non-Arab communities in and near a city in the western region of Darfur shows “hallmarks of genocide,” U.N.-backed human rights experts said Thursday, a dramatic finding in the country's devastating war.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces — known as RSF and at war with the Sudanese military — carried out mass killings and other atrocities in the city of el-Fasher after an 18-month siege during which they imposed conditions “calculated to bring about the physical destruction" of non-Arab communities, in particular the Zaghawa and the Fur communities, the independent fact-finding mission on Sudan reported.
U.N. officials say several thousand civilians were killed in the RSF takeover of el-Fasher, the Sudanese army’s only remaining stronghold in the Darfur. Only 40% of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to flee the onslaught alive, thousands of whom were wounded, the officials said. The fate of the rest remains unknown.
Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital of Khartoum and spread to other regions, including Darfur. So far, the war has killed more than 40,000 people, according to U.N. figures, but aid groups say that's an undercount and the true number could be many times higher.
The RSF overran el-Fasher last October and rampaged through the city in an offensive marked by widespread atrocities that included mass killings, sexual violence, torture and abductions for ransom, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.
They killed more than 6,000 people between Oct. 25 and Oct. 27, the office said. Ahead of the attack, the paramilitary forces ran riot in the Abu Shouk displacement camp, just outside el-Fasher, and killed at least 300 people in two days, it said.
The RSF did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment. The group's commander, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, has previously acknowledged abuses by his fighters, but disputed the scale of atrocities.
The report cited a systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence and destruction and public statements explicitly calling for the elimination of non-Arab communities.
An international convention known colloquially as the “Genocide Convention” — adopted in 1948, three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust — sets out five criteria to assess whether genocide has taken place. They include killing or seriously harming members of a group, preventing births or forcibly transferring children from the group, and inflicting measures to bring about the “physical destruction” of the group.
The fact-finding team said it found at least three of those five were met in the actions of the RSF: Killing members of a protected ethnic group; causing serious bodily and mental harm; and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part.
Under the convention, a genocide determination could be made even if only one of the five were met. The United Nations says a determination of genocide must be made by an international tribunal.
The head of the fact-finding team, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, said the RSF operation were not “random excesses of war” but a planned and organized operation that bore the characteristics of genocide.
El-Fasher's residents were "physically exhausted, malnourished, and in part unable to flee, leaving them defenseless against the extreme violence that followed,” the team's report said. “Thousands of persons, particularly the Zaghawa, were killed, raped or disappeared during three days of absolute horror.”
The report documented cases of survivors quoting RSF fighters as saying things like: “Is there anyone Zaghawa among you? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur.”
It also pointed to “selective targeting” of Zaghawa and Fur women and girls, “while women perceived as Arab were often spared."
Mona Rishmawi, a member of the fact-finding team, told a news conference in Geneva on Thursday that the team's conclusion was based on evidence of mass killings, patterns of ethnic targeting and statements by perpetrators expressing intent to eliminate and destroy the targeted communities.
“When you basically prevent the population from food ... drinking water and medical attention and prevent them from humanitarian assistance," she said. "What do you want? You want to destroy them. You want to kill them.”
“We reached the point of genocide now,” Rishmawi told reporters, adding that her team expects the parties in Sudan’s war to get the message that “enough is enough.”
At a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sudan later Thursday, U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo said that the “horrific events" in el-Fasher "were preventable.”
While el-Fasher was under siege, she said U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk repeatedly warned of the risk of mass atrocities, “but the warnings were not heeded.”
Türk has now also alerted the global community to the possibility of similar crimes in Sudan's Kordofan region, where the military and the RSF are fighting, DiCarlo said, urging action now to prevent a repeat of atrocities.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called the report's findings “truly horrific” and took them to the Security Council, saying she wanted to “ensure that the voices of women of Sudan who have endured so much are heard by the world.”
“Today’s report describes the most unimaginable and chilling horrors,” she said, citing the case of a woman asked by an RSF soldier how far she was in her pregnancy. “When she responded seven months, he fired seven bullets into her abdomen killing her,“ Cooper told the council.
“This is the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century, a war that has left 33 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, 14 million people forced to flee their homes, famine stalking millions of malnourished children,” Cooper said.
“The world is still failing the people of Sudan,” she added."
The fact-finding team was created in 2023 by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, the U.N.'s leading human rights body, which has 47 member nations.
The team called for accountability for perpetrators and warned that protection of civilians is needed “more than ever” because the conflict is expanding to other regions in Sudan.
Over the course of the conflict, the warring parties were accused of violating international law. But most of the atrocities were blamed on the RSF: The Biden administration, in one of its last decisions, said the paramilitary force committed genocide in Darfur.
U.N. experts and rights groups say the RSF has had the backing of the United Arab Emirates over the course of the war, allegations that the UAE denies.
The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias, notorious for atrocities they committed in the early 2000s in a ruthless campaign in Darfur that killed some 300,000 people and drove 2.7 million from their homes. Sudan's former autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir is still sought by the International Criminal Court for genocide and other crimes committed at that time.
Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Fatma Khaled in Cairo contributed to this report.
FILE - A Sudanese child, who fled el-Fasher city with family after Sudan's paramilitary forces attacked the western Darfur region, receives treatment at a camp in Tawila, Sudan, Nov. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Mohammed Abaker, File)
FILE - Sudanese families displaced from El-Fasher reach out as aid workers distribute food supplies at the newly established El-Afadh camp in Al Dabbah, Sudan's Northern State, Nov. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali, File)
FILE - Al Shafiea Abdallah Holy, an injured Sudanese man who fled el-Fasher city after Sudan's paramilitary forces attacked the western Darfur region, receives medical care at a camp in Tawila, Sudan, Oct. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Mohammed Abaker, File)
FILE - Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, center, greets the crowd during a military-backed tribes' rally in the Nile River State of Sudan, July 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Hjaj, File)
