It’s worth noting that Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan was the latest win for progressives across the country, many of whom challenged establishment-backed Democrats in key races across the country.
Last month, Democratic socialist Melat Kiros unseated the long-serving US representative Diana DeGette in Colorado’s primary elections.
And in New York, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who were all backed by mayor Zohran Mamdani, also won races in the June congressional primaries. Lander won his race comfortably, defeating the two-term Democratic representative Dan Goldman. Valdez won against Antonio Reynoso – the handpicked successor of Nydia Velázquez. And Chevalier toppled Representative Adriano Espaillat, the powerful five-term incumbent who chairs the congressional Hispanic caucus.
Despite progressive nominee Cori Bush’s loss in Missouri against pro-Israel incumbent Wesley Bell on Tuesday, Michigan insurgents in two key House races also claimed wins.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public-health official, won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan, narrowly defeating Haley Stevens. He will now face Republican Mike Rogers in a must-win race for Democrats.
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Donald Trump launched a racist tirade against El-Sayed, mocking his Arabic name and claiming that his criticism of Israel’s killing and mistreatment of Palestinians could only be motivated by antisemitism. “He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and is not a fricking thing he can do about it,” Trump said.
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At a rally in Nevada, Trump praised Jim Marchant, an election conspiracy theorist who is running to oversee Nevada’s elections as its secretary of state.
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Faced with a malfunctioning teleprompter, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, joked at Trump’s expense: “Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy.”
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Robert F Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has provided a copy of Dr Anthony Fauci’s phone to a Republican-led Senate panel investigating the doctor’s role as a senior advisor on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic to presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the Wall Street Journal reports. Kennedy, wrote a conspiratorial book attacking Fauci in 2021 that sold more than a million copies – thanks in part to blurbs from fellow non-scientists Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins.
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Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has backed a number of left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries this year, said on Wednesday that he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who has led in recent opinion polls of the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.
Bernie Sanders says he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong in Wisconsin governor’s race
Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has backed a number of left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries this year, said on Wednesday that he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who has led in recent opinion polls of the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.
In an interview with Pod Save America, Sanders was asked about the Wisconsin primary by Jon Favreau. “I noticed you haven’t yet endorsed in the Wisconsin governor’s race. What’s your thinking there, and might you endorse?” Favreau asked.
“I don’t think so,” Sanders replied. “I met a Francesca a couple of years ago, I was in Wisconsin, and she seems very, very nice. But again, this is a race I’m just not that familiar with.”
“We have not gotten involved in many governor’s races,” he added. “I think we did one in Maine, with Troy Jackson. You know, obviously, my major concern right now is seeing that we have a Senate and a House that is going to stand up to Trump.”
“So, as of now, we have not been involved in that race,” Sanders went on, referring to his political movement which is pushing the Democratic party he caucuses with but never joined, to the left.
Ahead of next week’s primary election, Hong, a Wisconsin state lawmaker who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been pressed to explain social media posts in 2020 in which she supported defunding and abolishing the police.
In the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August of 2020, Hong wrote on Twitter: “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”
Two months later, after federal prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to charge the officers who shot Blake with excessive force, Hong posted: “How is 7 bullets in the back not excessive force. Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option. My heart breaks for the trauma the Blake family and their community continues to endure. #BlackLivesMatter”
During an interview with Pod Save America earlier this week, Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, told Hong that “since Republicans will spend an ungodly amount of money um to defeat you, if you’re the nominee, to try to defeat you, I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”
He then asked her to explain how her views on policing “had evolved since 2020”.
“My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety, and I will not abolish the police,” Hong replied. “My views are that people are struggling right now and need basic eeds met and I want to focus on stopping violent crime and giving law enforcement the resources and the training that they need, but ensure that we are also holding accountable law enforcement that does not follow the law.”
“Do you still believe that police exist to uphold white supremacy?” Favreau asked.
“No,” Hong replied. “I’ve had more conversations with people who are more directly connected to the problems, and have learned that it is most important for a public servant like myself to make sure we’re looking at sensible, practical solutions.”
When Favreau asked Sanders on Wednesday if he thinks that it is risky for the Democrats to put forward DSA candidates who have talked about abolishing prisons and defunding or abolishing the police, the senator replied: “What you know as well as I do is that the right wing, that’s their job, right? They will take what one person said and put, you know, $80bn of TV ads on it and make the claim every Democrat supports that.”
No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote ‘defunding the police’,” Sanders continued. “I was a mayor for eight years, I worked very closely with cops. They have a very difficult job. Do we need police reform? Do we need to get rid of racism within police departments? Absolutely.”
“But nobody I know believes in ‘defunding the police’, he added.
“But a lot of this stuff, as you well know, is what the right wing plays on, and multiplies on Fox 10 times a day and through their ads,” Sanders said. “But most of the serious candidates that I know and support do not support those things.”
Rumors that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Maga congresswoman from Georgia, was about to announce the creation of a new political party with fellow exiles from the Trumpist movement, including Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie and Joe Kent, appear to have been greatly exaggerated.
However, the former congresswoman did unveil a different new venture this week: a Cameo account, where, for $150, her fans can now book Greene to deliver “unforgettable” video messages for friends or relations celebrating “a milestone birthday, an anniversary, or a long-awaited reunion”.
Robert F Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has provided a copy of Dr Anthony Fauci’s phone to a Republican-led Senate panel investigating the doctor’s role as a senior advisor on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic to presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Kennedy, a lawyer with no scientific training, wrote a conspiratorial, 500-page book attacking Fauci in 2021 that sold more than a million copies for a rightwing publisher – thanks in part to blurbs from fellow non-scientists Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins.
The chair of the Senate panel, Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, confirmed the report on social media.
“Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing,” Johnson added.
As his teleprompter glitches, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, mocks Trump
While delivering remarks, in English and French, about a drive to build affordable housing in Toronto on Wednesday, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, broke off from his prepared remarks to say: “I would now like to inform you that the teleprompter has ceased to function.”
As the audience laughed, Carney ad-libbed a jibe about Donald Trump. “Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy,” the prime minister said, to more laughter.
Last year, after his address to the United Nations general assembly was marred by technical mishaps – including a malfunctioning escalator, sound system and teleprompter – Trump suggested that he had been the victim of “triple sabotage at the UN”.
Later in the event, Carney also said that Canadian trade negotiators were talking with US counterparts to find some way to avoid the implementation, in two weeks, of new tariffs imposed by Trump on a broad range of imports from Canada, on everything from alcohol and cement to hockey sticks.
Carney’s mockery of Trump on Wednesday was not the first time he has made fun of the American president. Speaking in Ireland in June, Carney did a brief impression of Trump as he joked about having been presented with a ceremonial key to the White House during a visit to Washington.
Trump praises election conspiracy theorist running to oversee Nevada’s elections
Moments after Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, stepped off stage at the midterm campaign rally hosted by Donald Trump on Wednesday, the president praised an election conspiracy theorist who is running to oversee Nevada’s elections as its secretary of state, Jim Marchant.
The transition was awkward because Marchant won the Republican nomination for the office in June, narrowly defeating a candidate endorsed by Lombardo who is not an election-denier.
“A very special man, I wish you’d get him in office, because he’s incredible, I’ve known him so long and he’s got to get in, he just has to,” Trump said. “He had a big victory with spending very little money because everyone respects him, Jim Marchant, he’s a candidate for secretary of state.”
Marchant, who has spread baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud in Nevada for years, and previously said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, is attempting to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Cisco Aguilar, in a rematch of the 2022 election the Democrat won by just 23,000 votes.
Jon Ralston, the chief executive of the non-profit Nevada Independent, noted with amazement Trump’s endorsement of “an unhinged conspiracy theorist who said he didn’t even trust the results of his own primary he won”.
In racist rant, Trump claims Abdul El-Sayed ‘hates’ Jews ‘with a passion that burns in his heart’
In a speech laced with anti-Muslim animus, Donald Trump just accused Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate from Michigan, who is Muslim, of being motivated by deep-seated antisemitism.
El-Sayed, who narrowly won the Democratic primary in Michigan despite $30m in negative ads paid for by groups linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), has campaigned with Jewish supporters, but strongly condemned Israel’s killing and mistreatment of Palestinians.
According to Trump, El-Sayed is “a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel”.
“Just say this guy hates Jews. Somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s a little strong.’ No, he hates Jews and he hates Israel,” Trump said. “He’s a man of hate.”
The president then mockingly pronounced El-Sayed’s name, clearly stressing its Arabic origins, eliciting boos from his supporters in Nevada, just as his earlier reference to “Barack Hussein Obama” had. At another point in the speech, Trump also made a sarcastic reference to “the lovely Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Earlier on Wednesday, as other Republicans released frankly racist statements attempting to cast El-Sayed as a Muslim extremist, El-Sayed addressed Jewish Americans in comments carried live by Fox News.
“To my Jewish American sisters and brothers, one of the most indelible memories of this campaign will have been the opportunity to break bread with you at seder,” El-Sayed said, “and listening to sisters and brothers who said, ‘I want to join this movement because Aipac doesn’t speak for me; because I understand that self-determination for one people does not require the quenching of self-determination for another people; that unless all of us are free, none of us are free,’ I want to tell you the great gift that you’ve given me.”
“I want you to know,” he continued, “that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
Apparently referring to these comments, which were carried live on the president’s favorite network, Trump said: “Now he’s going around saying, ‘No, I love everybody … ’ He doesn’t love everybody. Put him in office, you’re going to find out what he loves. He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and is not a fricking thing he can do about it. There’s not a thing he can do about it ’cause he hates them.”
The idea that many non-Jews hold a deep-seated, unreasoning, anti-Jewish animus is a frequent claim made by Israeli politicians, including Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“When I watch Abdul,” Trump said later in the speech, “he’s full of shit.”
In Nevada, Donald Trump praises Donald Trump
Donald Trump is now speaking to supporters in Nevada, and so far he is giving a standard campaign rally speech, running through his standard boasts about how well he is doing and repeating false claims he has made again and again.
The president began by claiming that he had won Nevada in the 2024 election “in a landslide”. In fact, he won the state by 46,008 votes over Kamala Harris. Four years earlier, Trump had lost the state to Joe Biden by a similar if slightly smaller margin of 33,596 votes.
In a speech that was billed as a presidential address on the economy, but is in effect a midterm campaign rally for Republican candidates that support him, Trump went on to repeat a series of false claims, including: his wildly inflated estimate that $19tn has been invested by foreign businesses since he returned to office; “the economy is the greatest economy we’ve ever had by far”; the fiction that “25 million poured through our southern border” during the Biden administration.
Trump also told his entirely invented tale that “the king of Saudi Arabia” told him last year: “a year ago your country was dead; it was a dead country. We never thought it was coming back. And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
In fact, during his visit to Riyadh in 2025, Trump told the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the US was “the hottest country in the world”, a claim that he previously made at least a dozen times in public comments during his first term, starting with rally speeches ahead of the 2018 midterms, and has repeated dozens of times since.
Trump’s lawyers fight disclosure of his financial records to BBC in defamation suit
Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a federal judge in Miami on Wednesday to pause an earlier order that requires financial information for 400 of his business entities to be disclosed to the BBC, as the British broadcaster works to defend itself from Trump’s $10bn defamation suit over the editing of a documentary in 2024.
The earlier discovery order granted the broadcaster’s lawyers access to the financial information because, as the British legal writer David Allen Green explains, Trump had claimed that the editing of his speech to supporters on 6 January 2021, before they stormed the Capitol, had caused him massive reputational harm that cost his businesses vast sums of money. Framing the case that way let the BBC argue that it had a right to discovery on the actual state of Trump’s businesses.
As Courthouse News reports, Trump’s lawyers now want to narrow the scope of his defamation claim against the broadcaster to prevent the full disclosure of his financial affairs.
Life for Trump’s lawyers has not been made any easier by the fact that the president has, on at least five occasions since December, falsely claimed that the BBC did not just misleadingly edit his remarks from that day, but “used AI” to put words in his mouth that he did not say.
The actual BBC edit at issue spliced together two parts of Trump’s remarks that were actually spoken 54 minutes apart, but made no use of AI and the words were spoken by him, and were not, as he has claimed again and again, “AI generated”.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan, beating Haley Stevens in a bitter competition that became a referendum on the changing face of the Democratic party. El-Sayed won the race by a single point, fewer than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press. He will now face Republican nominee Mike Rogers – who ran unopposed – for a key battleground seat that is vital for Democrats to retain in order to achieve their lofty goal of reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber of Congress. More here
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Democrats quickly coalesced around El-Sayed following his narrow victory, urging their fractured coalition to back him with the goal of keeping the seat blue. Stevens said she has offered her “full support” to El-Sayed, while the Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, said there is “nothing more important” than “uniting” and moving forward. More here
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Meanwhile, Republicans wasted no time painting El-Sayed as a vote for “complete insanity”. Rogers, the GOP nominee, said the Senate race was now about “whether Michigan has a future built on common sense – or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation”. Donald Trump, for his part, said El-Sayed’s win was “great news” for Republicans, calling him a “communist loser”.
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Further down ballot, progressive Donavan McKinney beat incumbent Shri Thanedar in a closely watched Democratic primary for Michigan’s 13th congressional district. It was a contest that mirrored many of identity battles facing the party this midterm cycle.
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By a vote of 51-44, mainly along party lines, the Senate confirmed Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), after the agency has gone without a permanent director for almost a year. The previous Senate-confirmed leader – Susan Monarez – was ousted by Robert F Kennedy Jr last August, after they clashed over the health secretary’s vaccine policy.
