From 5h agoTrump backs Pete Hegseth amid renewed tensions with IranAsked by a reporter if he is frustrated with Pete Hegseth’s advice on Iran early on in the war, Trump expressed confidence in his defense secretary and said he thinks his Hegseth “has done a great job”.Trump has said that Hegseth and others led him to believe that Iran was actively preparing to attack the United States if Washington did not strike first. They advised him that the situation with Iran was rapidly approaching “a point of no return” and advocated for pre-emptive military action.Trump also claimed to reporters on Air Force One that Iran requested a meeting “through their surrogates and directly”.
double quotation markThey want to meet, and we’re meeting. Without what we did, they wouldn’t even be talking to us … They would not have requested the meeting if we were doing poorly. The only reason they want to meet is because we’ve been hitting them very hard.
Key events2h agoTrump wraps Michigan speech with old lies about mail voting and winning state's 'Man of the Year' award3h agoTrump administration asks supreme court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions3h agoComey asks judge to throw out case over '86 47' seashells post5h agoTrump backs Pete Hegseth amid renewed tensions with Iran5h agoTrump brushes off concerns of depleted ammunition due to his war on Iran6h agoMcConnell still not medically cleared to resume Senate work7h agoTrump says he's ready for ‘strong military action’ if Iran talks fail8h agoNetanyahu and Zelenskyy to arrive in Washington for Graham funeral – with hopes of winning Trump’s ear9h agoTrump calls on Senate Republicans to abandon the filibuster to pass restrictive voting bill10h agoDonald Trump to visit General Motors in Detroit to speak on economic agenda12h agoSenate to begin voting on Trump spy nominee ClaytonThe US Senate voted 51 to 43 on Monday to advance the nomination of Walter “Jay” Clayton to serve as the next director of national intelligence. Despite a lack of prior intelligence experience, which is mandated by law, Clayton is Donald Trump’s pick to replace Tulsi Gabbard in the role, which is being held on an acting basis by another political ally of the president, Bill Pulte, who also lacked that qualification when he took up the post last month.Trump wraps Michigan speech with old lies about mail voting and winning state's 'Man of the Year' awardDonald Trump wrapped up remarks at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan a short time ago with a pair of lies he has repeated many, many times.The first was his claim that “mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt” and the only reason for anyone to oppose his drive to require proof of citizenship to register to vote, and photo ID to cast a ballot, is that his opponents want to cheat.“We want voter photo ID. And we want all voters showing proof of a thing called citizenship,” Trump said late in his speech. “You read recently in New Jersey, where tremendous numbers of people were found out that they were on the voter rolls totally illegally, and that’s all over the country,” he added, mischaracterizing the scale of a computer glitch in New Jersey’s automatic voter registration system for licensed drivers that mistakenly registered about 6,600 people who identified themselves as non-US citizens.According to the state’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, who last week revealed the software error that was corrected before the 2024 election, “fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted,” and they were registered as Republicans, Democrats and Independents.“While administrative errors such as New Jersey’s do infrequently occur, they are very rare and affect a very small fraction of voters, David Becker, a voting rights expert who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research said. “In this case, the number of wrongful registrations represents a miniscule fraction, roughly 0.1%, of New Jersey’s total active voter registration records in 2024.”The president went on to claim that even he had been asked for ID when he voted at some unspecified time in the past. “Even me, I went to vote. ‘Sir, may I please see your identification? Sir, I’m so embarrassed; I know you’re Trump. Please. Do you have some identification? I don’t want to lose my job.’ I whipped out- I was lucky I had some kind of a card on me, I didn’t even know, but I gave it.”Trump did not say when this exchange took place, but he reportedly voted by mail himself earlier this year in a March special election in Florida even though he was in Palm Beach on the day the ballot was requested and returned.Trump did vote in person in Palm Beach in the 2024 and 2020 general elections, but his fuzzy memory about what sort of “a card” he provided as ID when asked at the polls suggests that it could have been a debit card, which was a sort of non-photo ID acceptable at the time to vote, along with other cards, like student IDs or retirement center IDs, that Florida poll workers could accept before the state’s law changed this year. Under the new law none of those forms of ID will be accepted any longer, requiring voters to produce a new form of drivers’ license that confirms citizenship, or a passport or a birth certificate along with another form of photo ID.While Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on voting rights advocates who oppose proof of citizenship and photo ID to register and cast ballots, a 2023 survey by the Brennan Center suggested that “more than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don’t have proof of citizenship readily available”, meaning a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers. “And at least 3.8 million don’t have these documents at all, often because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.”The Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland reported in 2024 that nearly 21 million voting-age US citizens “do not have a current (non-expired) driver’s license” and another 28.6 million have a non-expired license, but it does not have both their current address and current name.Before leaving Michigan, Trump also repeated a tale he has been telling for a decade, despite the fact that it is not true: that he was named Michigan’s Man of the Year before he ran for president.“I was here 25 years ago. I got Man of the Year,” Trump said, as he has claimed in the past during visits to the state as president. “The press questioned that and then they found out it was true, actually,” he added, falsely.As CNN’s tireless fact-checker Daniel Dale reported in 2024, the origin of Trump’s claim appears to be that he was invited to speak at a Republican event in the state in 2013, where, according to a former Republican congressman who was there, Trump was presented with a framed copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Years later, when Trump started claiming he had been given a Michigan Man of the Year award, the congressman told CNN that was untrue. But a local Republican group tied to make it seem true in 2023, by naming Trump the state’s Man of the Decade.Trump administration asks supreme court to allow mail-in ballot restrictionsThe Trump administration has asked the US supreme court to allow implementation nationwide of his executive order aimed at tightening rules for mail-in voting ahead of the November midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.In a filing, the justice department requested that the justices put on hold a judge’s ruling preventing the enforcement of the president’s directive in 23 mostly Democratic-governed states and Washington DC, which had challenged the order as unconstitutional, while the litigation plays out.Last month, US district judge Indira Talwani ruled that the provisions of an executive order issued by Donald Trump on 31 March requiring the postal service to require the use of a barcode tracking system for ballot envelopes tied to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data was unconstitutional.It comes amid Trump’s wider drive to reshape rules and regulations around voting ahead of the midterms. Trump is pushing Congress to pass the Save America Act, which would impose new ID requirements on voters and curtail mail-in voting, which he has long railed against alleging widespread fraud – despite never producing any evidence of this and despite the fact the he has voted by mail himself.Donald Trump has told the crowd at General Motors Proving Grounds in Milford, Michigan, that the US has been having “very friendly” talks with Iran.
