Trump press secretary denies US position on Iran regime change has altered
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked just now about Trump’s statements last night regarding regime change in Iran.
“The President’s posture and our military posture has not changed” Leavitt said. “The President was just simply raising a question that I think many people around the world are asking, if the Iranian regime refuses to give up their nuclear program or engage in talks … if they refuse to engage in diplomacy moving forward, why shouldn’t the Iranian people rise up against this brutal terrorist regime?”
“That’s a question the President raised last night,” she added. “But as far as our military posture, it hasn’t changed.”
Leavitt also said that there has been both “public and private messages sent to the Iranians” since Saturday night.
Key events
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on “Good Morning America” this morning and said that the Trump administration is confident that the airstrikes the US carried out on Saturday in Iran “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities.
“We are confident that Iran’s nuclear sites were completely and totally obliterated” Leavitt said. “And we have a high degree of confidence that where those strikes took place is where Iran’s enriched uranium was stored.”
“The president wouldn’t have launched the strikes if we weren’t confident in that” Leavitt added.
Trump will push Nato members to increase defense spending when he goes to the Nato alliance summit on Tuesday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt says.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday morning, Leavitt said that Trump would push Nato members to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP.
“One of the main topics of discussion will be that 5% threshold that our Nato allies have to hit” Leavitt said. “The president has been calling on our Nato allies to do more for quite some time. He got them to step up and do more in his first term, and you’ll hear the president talk about that on this next historic trip to Europe.”
The US president and his Nato counterparts are scheduled to meet for the annual Nato summit, which will take place over two days in The Hague, Netherlands, on Tuesday.
Trump press secretary denies US position on Iran regime change has altered
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked just now about Trump’s statements last night regarding regime change in Iran.
“The President’s posture and our military posture has not changed” Leavitt said. “The President was just simply raising a question that I think many people around the world are asking, if the Iranian regime refuses to give up their nuclear program or engage in talks … if they refuse to engage in diplomacy moving forward, why shouldn’t the Iranian people rise up against this brutal terrorist regime?”
“That’s a question the President raised last night,” she added. “But as far as our military posture, it hasn’t changed.”
Leavitt also said that there has been both “public and private messages sent to the Iranians” since Saturday night.
President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with his national security team at 1pm ET today in the Oval Office, according to his schedule.
This comes as on Sunday evening, Trump hinted at the question of regime change in Iran, despite top officials in his administration, including Vice-President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have stressed over the last few days that the Trump administration was not interested in overthrowing Iran’s government.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” Trump posted on social media. “MIGA!!!”.
The US embassy in Qatar has advised American citizens there to “shelter in place until further notice”.
This comes as on Sunday night, the state department issued a “worldwide caution” security alert advising US citizens abroad to “exercise increased caution”.
Trump insists ‘monumental damage’ done by US strikes in Iran but others are more cautious
Peter Beaumont
Donald Trump has doubled down on claims “monumental damage” had been done to Iran’s nuclear sites, as the head of the UN’s nuclear agency said that while he anticipated “very significant damage” at the underground Fordow site, the agency had not been able to assess it.
Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Iran had told the agency it had planned to take “special measures” to protect equipment and nuclear materials on 13 June.
Trump, who has a reputation for hyperbole, again stated that the sites had been “obliterated” by this weekend’s US bombings, in contrast with the more cautious language from the Pentagon and Israeli officials.
“Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images,” he said in a social media post. “Obliteration is an accurate term!” Pentagon officials have characterised the damage to the sites – at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan – as “severe”.
Assessing the extent of the damage has been complicated by the fact that the US, Israel and the IAEA only have access to surface satellite imagery of the sites and reporting from Iran’s nuclear agency on any contamination.
Satellite imagery of Fordow taken in the days before the US attack showed an unusual volume of truck traffic. The images appeared to confirm that Iranian authorities had preemptively removed some material from the site, possibly including its uranium stockpile – or parts of it.
Thousands of Iranian nationals “have been documented entering the United States illegally” and pose a sleeper cell threat, The Hill has reported.
According to US Customs and BorderPprotection (CBP), the threat of sleeper cells in the US has “never been higher”.
However, there are no current specific threats, according to a memo sent on Saturday from CBP commissioner Rodney Scott.
“Though we have not received any specific credible threats to share with you all currently, the threat of sleeper cells or sympathizers acting on their own, or at the behest of Iran has never been higher,” Scott added.
The memo urged CBP personnel to remain “vigilant.”
Jessica Glenza
Advocates are urging Senate Republicans to reject a proposal to cut billions from American healthcare to extend tax breaks that primarily benefit the wealthy and corporations.
The proposal would make historic cuts to Medicaid, the public health insurance program for low-income and disabled people that covers 71 million Americans, and is the Senate version of the “big beautiful bill” act, which contains most of Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.
“With the text released earlier this week, somehow the Senate made the House’s ‘big, bad budget bill’ worse in many ways,” said Anthony Wright, the executive director of Families USA, a consumer healthcare advocacy group, in a press call.
The Senate’s version makes deeper cuts to Medicaid and so-called Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) plans, “both by expanding paperwork requirements and making it harder for states to fund Medicaid coverage for their residents”, said Wright.
If passed, the House-passed bill would have already made the biggest cuts to Medicaid since the program’s enactment in 1965. With red tape and an expiration of additional healthcare subsidies to Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the House version would leave 16 million people without health insurance by 2034.
A Tennessee judge on Sunday ordered the release of Kilmar Ábrego García, whose mistaken deportation has become a flashpoint in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, while he awaits a federal trial on human smuggling charges. But he is not expected to be allowed to go free.
At his 13 June detention hearing, prosecutors said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) would take Ábrego García into custody if he were released on the criminal charges, and he could be deported before he has a chance to stand trial.
US magistrate judge Barbara Holmes has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to discuss the conditions of Ábrego García’s release. The US government has already filed a motion to appeal the judge’s release order.
Holmes acknowledged in her ruling on Sunday that determining whether Ábrego García should be released is “little more than an academic exercise” because Ice will probably detain him. But the judge wrote that everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence and “a full and fair determination of whether he must remain in federal custody pending trial”.
Holmes wrote that the government failed to prove that Ábrego García was a flight risk, that he posed a danger to the community or that he would interfere with proceedings if released.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
The Ohio high school graduate and soccer standout who was recently deported from the US to Honduras despite having no arrest record has described being “handcuffed like we’re some big criminals” for the entirety of his deportation flight.
“To me, it was kind of more traumatizing because I haven’t been to my birth country in years,” Emerson Colindres, 19, who was brought from Honduras to the US by his family at age eight, said to the Cincinnati news station WCPO in an interview over the weekend.
He also told the outlet that his pre-deportation detention before leaving the US was “mentally draining”, mainly because he spent all but two hours daily sitting in a jail cell “doing nothing”.
Colindres’s remarks to WCPO were some of his first about an experience vividly contradicting claims that the immigration crackdown spearheaded by Donald Trump since he began his second presidency in January has prioritized targeting dangerous criminals.
He was a star soccer player at Gilbert A Dater high school, had no criminal record, and was attending a regularly scheduled appointment with Immigration and Customers Enforcement (Ice) in Cincinnati when he was detained on 4 June. It was mere days after his graduation from Dater.
Teachers and soccer teammates from Dater joined protests that gathered at the local jail where he was held until his transfer to an Ice facility in Louisiana. Then, on 18 June, the Trump administration deported Colindres to a country where he had not lived for about 11 years.
Speaking to WCPO from Honduras on a video phone call on Saturday, Colindres said he was relieved to no longer be jailed. “You were in there 22 hours in the cell doing nothing,” Colindres said of his confinement. “That’s crazy – like, that’s all … mentally draining.”
He argued that “a lot of people” on his ensuing deportation flights had no arrest records in the US, “like myself included”.
Nonetheless, “the whole flight I was handcuffed like we’re some big criminals,” Colindres added.
Pakistan condemned US president Donald Trump for bombing Iran, less than 24 hours after saying he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for defusing a recent crisis with India.
Relations between the two South Asian countries plummeted after a massacre of tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir in April, AP reports.
The nuclear-armed rivals stepped closer to war in the weeks that followed, attacking each other until intense diplomatic efforts, led by the US, resulted in a truce for which Trump took credit.
It was this “decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership” that Pakistan praised in an effusive message Saturday night on the X platform when it announced its formal recommendation for him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Less than 24 hours later, however, it condemned the US for attacking Iran, saying the strikes “constituted a serious violation of international law” and the statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Edward Helmore
JD Vance has said the US is “not at war” with Iran – but is with its nuclear weapons program, holding out a position that the White House hopes to maintain over the coming days as the Iranian regime considers a retributive response to Saturday’s US strike on three of its nuclear installations.
In an interview Sunday with NBC News’ Meet the Press, the US vice-president was asked if the US was now at war with Iran.
“We’re not at war with Iran,” Vance replied. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
But Vance declined to confirm with absolute certainty that Iran’s nuclear sites were completely destroyed, a position that Donald Trump set out in a Saturday night address when the president stated that the targeted Iranian facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated” in the US strikes.
Vance instead said that he believes the US has “substantially delayed” Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon.
“I’m not going to get into sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground there in Iran, but we’ve seen a lot, and I feel very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon, and that was the goal of this attack,” Vance said.
He continued: “Severely damaged versus obliterated – I’m not exactly sure what the difference is.
President Donald Trump has called into question the future of Iran’s ruling theocracy, seemingly contradicting his administration’s earlier calls to resume negotiations and avoid an escalation in fighting.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” Trump posted on social media. “MIGA!!!”
The posting on Truth Social marked something of a reversal from defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s Sunday morning news conference that detailed the aerial bombing on three of the country’s nuclear sites.
“This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Hegseth said.
Trump’s military attack on Iran reveals split among Maga diehards
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I am Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that Saturday’s US strikes on Iran provoked conflicting reactions from isolationist Republicans who support Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) movement, catching them – like many Democrats – between supporting efforts against nuclear proliferation and opposing American intervention in foreign conflicts.
The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a loyalist to the president – reacted to the strikes by urging those in the US to pray that terrorists do not attack “our homeland” in retaliation.
“Let us join together and pray for the safety of our US troops and Americans in the Middle East,” Greene wrote on X.
But Greene had not been so supportive in a message posted 30 minutes before Trump announced news of the surprise strikes on Saturday evening.
In that message, Greene wrote: “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel if [its prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation. This is not our fight. Peace is the answer.”
The former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has been an opponent of US military intervention in Iran, hit out at the president for thanking Netanyahu in a national address shortly after the strikes.
Speaking on his War Room web show, Bannon said, “It hasn’t been lost … that he thanked Bibi Netanyahu, who I would think right now – at least the War Room’s position is – [is] the last guy on Earth you should thank.”
Read the full report here:
In other developments:
