Trump backs Pete Hegseth amid renewed tensions with Iran
Asked 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”.
They 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 events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
-
The two Democrats running for their party’s nomination to represent Michigan in the US Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official , and Haley Stevens, a congresswoman, clashed in a debate before next week’s primary.
-
As Donald Trump tried to shore up support for his party ahead of the looming midterms, his speech in Michigan was disrupted by protesters angry about his promotion of data centers and his reluctance to release all of the files on the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender Trump socialized with for at least 17 years.
-
The 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.
-
The 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.
Ella Brockway
Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, has launched an investigation into Fifa president Gianni Infantino, seeking documents that would detail the ties between soccer’s governing body and Donald Trump and his administration.
In a Sunday letter, Raskin wrote to Infantino and called for Fifa to provide any documents and communications related to gifts, payments or benefits provided to Trump and his associates, as well as the visitor logs for Fifa’s office space in Trump Tower, which it acquired last year. The committee also requested that Infantino sit for a transcribed interview.
Infantino’s relationship with Trump came under scrutiny in the lead-up to this summer’s World Cup. In December, at the World Cup draw in Washington, Trump was awarded a newly created “Fifa peace prize” at the Kennedy Center, where renovations were allegedly “rushed” on the administration’s orders to prepare for the event. Fifa opened its office in Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan last July.
Such scrutiny intensified during the World Cup. Trump made several calls to Infantino to lobby for a review of US striker Folarin Balogun’s controversial red-card suspension before the Americans’ last-16 match against Belgium. Fifa did reverse Balogun’s ban, but the political circus cast a pall over the US team and drew the ire of other teams and associations from around the world.
Alongside the leaders of Canada and Mexico, Trump joined Infantino for the World Cup trophy presentation after Spain beat Argentina in the final. The pair, who watched the final together in a glassed-in section of luxury seats, were met with boos from the New York New Jersey Stadium crowd when they took the field.
Raskin’s letter references the Department of Justice’s decision to “dismiss the indictments” of defendants in US government investigations into corruption in global soccer, including the 2015 prosecution of more than 20 high-level Fifa officials and sports-marketing executives.
George Chidi
A controversial move by the Pentagon to reclassify casualties in the Iran war is being taken by US military veterans as a sign of disrespect for the dead.
“It’s such a huge disrespect for the families,” said Michael E Smith, a retired US rear admiral and the founder of National Security Leaders for America. “To claim that they weren’t killed as a result of the war – oh, it was just overseas operations – is just ludicrous.”
In a quiet weekend update to the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), a military database for displaying casualties, the US Department of Defense – renamed the Department of War under Donald Trump – added more than 140 wounded service members.
They also introduced a new casualty category labeled “Overseas Operations” for personnel killed and wounded “starting July 7” which splits the count from the beginning of the US-Israel war on Iran.
Four US service members killed in action by Iranian forces fall under that category: 1st Lt Tyler James Feehan, Pvt Isabella Gonzales, Sgt Angel S. Rampersad and Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton.
“I definitely think that this isn’t an issue just about numbers, but also about accountability,” said Tristeza Ordex, a US Marine Corps veteran and the national organizer of partnerships and engagement at VoteVets.
“When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I remember attending ramp ceremonies,” she said, referring to an airfield memorial honoring a fallen service member before their casket is loaded onto an aircraft and returned home.
Stevens and El-Sayed close with pitches about why they are the more formidable opponent for Republican Mike Rogers
The Michigan Senate debate, which raced by at lightening speed, closes with this question from the moderator: “We have 30 seconds left for each of you to answer the following question: what makes you think you’re the formidable candidate who can take on Mike Rogers?”
“Poll after poll after poll,” El-Sayed begins, “has shown, despite what my colleague says, that I am the most competitive candidate to take on Mike Rogers.”
“But it’s also this that you’ve got to have something you’re fighting for,” he continues. “Ask yourself, if DTE funds both Mike Rogers and Haley Stevens, who wins?” El-Sayed asks, referencing donations from Detroit-based DTE Energy which provides power to Southeast Michigan customers. “DTE wins and Blue Cross and Big Pharma and Big Tech and Aipac: all funded by the same people,” he answers.
“We need a choice. I’m the only candidate in this race who does not take corporate money. And so I offer a real contrast to a guy who has never seen a corporate dollar he did not want,” El-Sayed concludes.
“Well, look,” Stevens says. “Governor Whitmer, attorney general Nessel, the chair of the Michigan legislative Black caucus, Amos O’Neill, they all agree that I will be Michigan’s workhorse, that I will stand up for us on day one, that I will beat Mike Rogers, just like I have beat Republicans four times over.”
With that, the debate ends, a week before Democratic primary voters pick one of the two to try to hold the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic senator Gary Peters. Democrats know that they need to retain the seat to have any realistic chance of regaining control of the Senate in November.
El-Sayed says he would work for Medicare for All, and to eliminate $225b in medical debt
“Anybody who knows me, knows that getting people health care is the passion of my life,” El-Sayed says, when asked about his main goal in seeking office. “I went to medical school only to realize that too often our health care system is part of the problem.”
“We need and deserve guaranteed health care through Medicare for All,” he continues. “I have been thinking about this question. In fact, I’ve testified to the US Senate twice.”
“Now on Medicare for All, there is work that we’re going to have to do,” he adds. “We’re going to have to get a president elected who can do it in 2029. Now, in the process, though, I actually think that we could eliminate all the medical debt in this country, $225b.”
Stevens tries to cast El-Sayed as a podcaster, not a lawmaker
“Complaints and slogans aren’t solutions,” Haley Stevens says in an extended discussion of which candidate’s approach to stopping the abuses of ICE is more effective.
“I went up to an ICE detention facility to call out and see why people were losing their lives, why they were being held for long periods of time without due process. This has been an outrage,” Stevens says.
“Look, a lot of you remember Abdul from when he first ran for governor in 2018,” she continues, turning back to her frame that her opponent is more experienced as an influencer than a lawmaker. “It didn’t work out, so he started the podcast, he wrote the books, and now he’s running for Senate and he’s already bought the website for president. You know, it’s just another rung on the ladder.”
“That’s not what this job is for me,” Stevens adds. “That’s not why I’m putting up my hand in this moment. It’s not about celebrity. This is about making sure that Mike Rogers doesn’t get anywhere close to this seat. I’m the only one on this stage who has beat MAGA four times”.
“Like I told all the viewers at the outset that while my opponent was going to make this about me and her, I want to make this about you somehow,” El-Sayed counters. “Congresswoman, if you enjoy podcasts about public health, I welcome you to take a listen. You seem very concerned about that. I’m more concerned about the fact that people can’t pay for their gas. They can’t pay for their groceries. We’re fighting a war that’s cost us billions of dollars, that has been pushed by the the government of a foreign country, the same foreign country that the folks paying for your ads want us to send billions of dollars to.”
‘We don’t need a celebrity senator’, Stevens says of El-Sayed
In response to a question about ICE, Stevens damns El-Sayed with faint praise, saying:
“I am standing up to Trump right now on these abuses of power, not shouting into a bullhorn, not getting in front of the first camera I see, but doing the hard work. That is what Michigan deserves. Look my my opponent here, Abdul, he is such a talented guy. He’s written three books. He did 300 podcasts. You know, he’s had all this attention. But the deal is, is we don’t need a celebrity candidate. We don’t need a celebrity senator. We need somebody who is committed to six years of hard, unglamorous work”.
Stevens goes on to argue that she has worked in Congress to rein in the immigration enforcement agency, casting El-Sayed and his call to abolish ICE as a protester rather than a doer.
“When it comes to the question of immigration,” El-Sayed responds, “we need Democrats who are going to stand up and actually talk about the great good that immigration has done for our country in the first place, the idea that somehow we can’t say ‘Abolish ICE’ because we’re so afraid of what they’re going to say when we’ve seen ICE terrorize people in our streets, to me, is exactly the kind of cowardice that we don’t need from Democrats. So, yeah, I’m going to take the bullhorn, and I’m going to say that I think we need to abolish ICE, because I am not afraid of what they’re going to say about me”.
Haley Stevens focuses on claim that Republican Mike Rogers wants to run against El-Sayed, not her
As the debate enters a second phase, Haley Stevens is asked whether she is hurt by the fact that the powerful United Auto Workers endorsed El-Sayed, not her.
In her answer, Stevens agains pivots back to her claim that the Republican nominee fo the Michigan Senate seat, Mike Rogers, would rather run against El-Sayed. In fact, Stevens has repeated the name Mike Rogers again and again in many of her answers, to promote her case that she is the more electable Democrat.
El-Sayed counters that the attack ads against him are a sign that supporters of Stevens think she needs help to get elected.
“When you ask $60m to come into a race for you and then say that somehow you’re electable, I think you don’t quite understand what electability means,” El-Sayed said. “If you need a $60 million crutch, you probably can’t be elected on your own terms. So I would just say that you should probably, if you really want to beat Mike Rogers, find the candidate who is electable without having to ask for a $60 million crutch to do it.”
El-Sayed also argues that he wants to eliminate the power of money in US politics and says that he supports removing the filibuster from the Senate to make change.
‘I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works’, El-Sayed says
Asked about whether he would call himself a progressive or a democratic socialist, El-Sayed replies:
I’m a doctor and a scientist. I want policy solutions that actually map to the problems that we face.
My governing experience is rebuilding a health department in the city of Detroit, leading Wayne County Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services. We had to go in there and work with a diverse community to be asking, what are the challenges we face and how do we actually solve them? We were able to identify the fact that our county ranked number eight for medical debt and nationwide, and we could eliminate that for a penny on the dollar. So we set aside $7 million to race up to $700 million in medical debt. When kids couldn’t get glasses, 30% of them would get tested positive for needing glasses and wouldn’t get a pair. We put optometrists on vans outside of school so that as soon as a kid got a positive test, they go out and get a full optometric exam and get a pair of glasses delivered within two weeks of a vision test.
Now, working with a diverse community of people, you come to realize that not every solution fits the same way. You’ve got to be thinking about a solution in the right way. When it comes to the question of socialism, I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. The biggest threat to capitalism was never the idea of government regulation. It was always monopoly.
Lauren Gambino
The Democratic primary to replace retiring senator Gary Peters has evolved into a proxy fight over its future, pitting the establishment-backed moderate against the progressive former Detroit health director. The candidates have split sharply on the issue of Israel, with Haley Stevens identifying as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and accepting substantial support from American Israel Public Affairs Committee. By contrast, Abdul El-Sayed has called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a “genocide” and railed against US arms support for Israel.
Last week, Stevens picked up the endorsement of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who El-Sayed challenged unsuccessfully in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. El-Sayed has rallied the party’s left flank with endorsements from senator Bernie Sanders and congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, turning the closely-watched Senate contest into a clear test of whether the twin forces of anti-Washington sentiment and progressive energy can overcome broad institutional support in a presidential battleground state.
The contest – one of the few open-seat races this cycle – is widely viewed as central to the battle for Senate control. Donald Trump won the state in 2024, making it among Republicans’ most promising pick-up opportunities. Former congressman Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost Michigan’s 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin, cleared the Republican field early and has spent months preparing for the general election while Democrats have waged an expensive and increasingly bitter primary.
Earlier on Monday, Rogers appeared on stage with Trump at a rally in Milford, Michigan, where he promised to help the president enact his agenda, if elected.
Abdul El-Sayed defends leaked ‘ogre’ comment as a reference to John Fetterman, not Haley Stevens
In a very fast-paced debate, the moderator just asked Abdul El-Sayed to explain who he was talking about in leaked audio when he referenced the need to put the head of an “ogre” on a spike.
“Earlier this week, we heard that there was some kind of a Zoom call in which you would reference an opponent as ogre on a pike, and so many people took offense to that,” the moderator Roop Raj began. “Do you regret any of the comments that you’ve made?”
“Look, I took to Twitter last week and said that the tone in which people talk about my opponent is unkind, and I asked anybody who supported me to not talk about her that way,” El-Sayed replied.
“I was referring to a guy named John Fetterman, who’s a senator from Pennsylvania who has done terrible things, got elected on a set of values, and is now completely throwing those values in the mud,” he added. “And I do think it’s important for any senator in Michigan to have a relationship with folks who are in the US Senate, and if those folks are not actually acting in accordance with what they got elected on, I think it’s important for all of us to have an honest opinion about what we’re going to do to make sure that our Senate looks like the people it represents.”
“Thank you for clarifying that you didn’t call me an ogre,” Stevens said.
Michigan Senate candidates spar over corporate campaign contributions and support for Israel
The debate in the Michigan Senate race has turned to the question of the $46m spent by Aipac, the pro-Israel lobby, to support Stevens, and the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Michigan voters.
Stevens said that she supports a two-state solution, which the veteran peace negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have recently described as a dangerous myth in a new book about the failure of the framework that has not moved the region closer to peace.
El-Sayed stresses that he does not want Michigan taxpayers’ money to be sent to a foreign government.
Michigan Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens debate ahead of primary
The final televised debate between the two Democrats running for their party’s nomination for the US Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official who is backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Haley Stevens, a congresswoman backed by Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, is underway.
The debate is being live-streamed and we will bring you updates as the hour-long event unfolds.
In the first exchanges, El-Sayed referenced his opposition to military aid to Israel and the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) for his opponent. Stevens called herself the more electable candidate and accused the progressive populist of running for celebrity rather than results.
Protesters disrupt Trump’s speech to chant against data centers and call him a ‘pedophile protector’
Donald Trump just arrived back in the White House from his trip to Michigan for what was effectively a campaign rally for Republican candidates ahead of the primary elections there next week.
As the president tried to shore up support for his party ahead of the looming midterms, his speech was disrupted by protesters angry about two aspects of Trump’s second term: his promotion of data centers to power an AI transformation many Americans oppose and his reluctance to release all of the files from the federal investigations into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender Trump socialized with for at least 17 years.
Early in Trump’s speech, a group of protesters in the crowd held up banners that read “Stop Data Centers”, and chanted against the power-hungry AI facilities before being bundled away. Trump was speaking in Michigan’s seventh congressional district where one of the Democrats running for Congress, the Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence, is promising to back a moratorium on data centers.
Another lone protester interrupted the president’s remarks with a reference to the Epstein files, loudly shouting “pedophile protector” at Trump, again and again.
The 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’ award
Donald 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 restrictions
The 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.
