Melania Trump nods to questions around absence: ‘I heard you missed me. Here I am’
Aaand, scratch that. The Trumps have arrived early.
“Good afternoon. I heard you missed me. Here I am,” says Melania Trump, to laughs from the audience.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our programming for the evening. Thanks for joining us and here are the latest developments in the unfolding sequel to the first Trump presidency:
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The White House faced fresh questions over whether Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, had access to US government secrets without security clearance.
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At a Rose Garden event to promote Melania Trump’s advocacy for foster children, the first lady opened with a joked about her lack of recent public appearances, as her husband looked on with something less than rapt attention.
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Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, who turned on the president in 2019, when he compared him to a mobster during congressional testimony, executed another 180-degree turn, showering the president with praise during a friendly conversation between the two men on Cohen’s New York City radio show.
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A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California.
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Progressive Aisha Wahab was elected to Congress in a special election following a bitter intra-party battle over the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell.
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One week after Trump ordered his navy secretary to redesign a new aircraft carrier, the USS Doris Miller – to scrap the modern electromagnetic system used to launch fighter jets, and install old-fashioned steam-powered catapults instead – CNN reports that the navy is considering another change to the same ship: removing the name of Miller, a Black sailor known for his heroism during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and naming it instead the USS Donald Trump.
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The non-partisan Cook Political Report updated its midterm election forecast to rate the US Senate races in both Texas and Iowa, which had leaned in favor of Republicans, as toss ups that could break for Democrats.
Los Angeles mayor’s attack on taco trucks puzzles voters
Voters in Los Angeles were left scratching their heads on Thursday, as word spread that the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, had suggested during a heated mayoral debate that taco trucks, a beloved LA institution, were a nuisance she compared to homeless encampments .
The mayor made the remarks as she attempted to attack her rival, city council member Nithya Raman, for defending street vendors in response to a question from one of the moderators at a debate sponsored by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association.
“Just across the parking lot from here, La Fogata restaurant has been serving our community for 50 years. So now an unpermitted street vendor is operating in the parking lot and selling tacos,” the moderator began.
“How is that fair to an established local business that pays rent and taxes and complies with health and business regulations? Shouldn’t LA county require street vendors to meet the same health and safety standards as brick and mortar restaurants?” she asked.
“I really, really value our restaurant community,” Raman replied. “The food of Los Angeles is incredibly important. Street vendors in Los Angeles are a vibrant part of our community as well.”
She went on to argue that “if regulated appropriately … I believe the two can coexist in LA and actually make this city better”.
“I do not think that you should have a food vendor in front of a restaurant, period,” Bass countered. “I would like to see street vendors move into brick-and-mortar facilities so they can be restaurants.”
Having taco trucks “right in front of a restaurant … discourages patrons from going in”, Bass added, without explaining how. “Just like you shouldn’t have encampments in front of restaurants or in front of schools. You just should not do that. We have to end street homelessness. Period.”
To some Angelenos, the attack from Bass on their culture sounded like an echo of a claim made by one of Donald Trump’s supporters in the last phase of the 2016 campaign.
“My culture is a very dominant culture,” Marco Gutierrez, the Mexican-born founder of Latinos for Trump told MSNBC in September 2016, casting Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as common sense. “It is imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner,” he added, triggering a tidal wave of memes and a rebuttal from Hillary Clinton.
Dani Anguiano
Progressive Aisha Wahab has been elected to Congress in a special election following a bitter intra-party battle over the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April after facing sexual misconduct allegations. Swalwell has denied the allegations.
Wahab, a state senator, was widely considered the frontrunner in the district in California’s East Bay and had the backing of the state Democratic party as well as Our Revolution, labor unions, local officials and the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta.
She won the primary for the special election for the final months of Swalwell’s term by more than 20 points over Melissa Hernandez, the president of the board of directors for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) agency.
The same two candidates then faced off again in a general election rematch that was much closer.
“I will fight for this district that raised me,” Wahab said in a statement on Thursday. “From foster care to Congress, this journey shows the possibility of the American Dream.”
While Wahab held a major lead throughout the race, Hernandez’s campaign received a significant boost as Super Pacs connected to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) poured money into the race.
With 92% of votes counted on Thursday afternoon, Wahab led Hernandez by just over six points – a much closer race than expected.
Earlier this month, it emerged that Super Pacs had spent more than $5m in a matter of weeks on pro-Hernandez ads and Wahab attack ads. Track Aipac, which monitors the group’s funding of US politicians, recently reported that the lobby had spent nearly $6.4m to support Hernandez.
Wahab, the first Muslim woman and Afghan American elected to the California legislature, told the Guardian there had been a sudden surge of critical ads that had misrepresented her record. She described the Super Pacs’ involvement as election interference, and said they were attempting to buy the seat.
Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen tries to make amends by hosting president he compared to ‘a mobster’ on his radio show
Donald Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who turned on the president in 2019, when he compared him to a mobster during congressional testimony, executed another 180-degree turn on Thursday, showering the president with praise during a friendly conversation between the two men broadcast on Cohen’s New York City radio show.
Cohen, who played the 1970s R&B hit Reunited in the background as he told listeners to tune in on Sunday for more of the interview, introduced the chat by saying that the two men had forgiven each other. Cohen then criticized people who think “holding on to hatred is a sign of strength”. Trump, famously, holds grudges for decades.
In the part of the conversation broadcast on Thursday, and then posted on YouTube, Cohen reminded Trump of his combative cable news appearances in defense of his candidacy in 2016. Trump responded: “you were a good advocate and then they weaponized you like nobody’s ever been weaponized, like few have been”.
“Well, maybe just you and I, sir,” Cohen interjected.
“Yeah, me too”, Trump said. “But they weaponized you; they weaponized a lot of people. And I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said, and that’s a big that’s a big thing that you did, that’s a very big thing.”
Cohen also fully supported Trump’s baseless claim that Iran would have obtained nuclear weapons and destroyed Israel by now had he not been elected president in 2024. That claim is contradicted by the fact that a 2025 US intelligence assessment, released shortly before Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, said that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003.
Later in the chat, Cohen again tried to jog Trump’s memory of his former role as his closest aide by saying, “Boss, you remember when I was by your side?”
At another stage in the conversation, Trump appeared to tacitly admit that he lost the 2020 election.
“I got elected partially on the border,” Trump said of his 2024 victory over Kamala Harris. “By the way, that happened two times”, he added. “When I ran in 2016, I got elected on the border”.
Trump usually claims to have been elected three times, based on his lie that he won the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump went on to claim that Cohen had been unfairly threatened with jail by the Manhattan and New York state prosecutors who used his testimony to convict Trump of campaign finance violations and fraud.
In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to orchestrating $280,000 in payments during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to buy the silence of two women who threatened to speak publicly about their alleged affairs with Trump.
In 2019, after defecting from Trump’s orbit, Cohen told Congress: “I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience. I am ashamed, because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist, he is a con man, and he is a cheat.”
In the same testimony, Cohen provided a Democratic-led committee with what he said was a copy of a check Trump wrote from his personal bank account to reimburse Cohen for hush-money payments to one of the women, Stormy Daniels, “to cover up his affair with an adult film star, and to prevent damage to his campaign.”
Cohen later testified to a Manhattan court in 2024 that he submitted fake invoices for legal services in 2016 to cover up what were, in fact, reimbursements for $130,000 hush-money payments to Daniels and that that he knew the payment violated federal election law.
After recording his chat with Trump, Cohen admitted to CNN that he had submitted a formal request for a pardon for the crimes he admitted to in 2018.
Cohen said that he first submitted a pardon request to Biden, which was supported by Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman, but never acted on. Recently, Cohen said, he changed the cover letter on the application so that it now urges Trump to grant him clemency.
Navy considers plan to rename aircraft carrier for Trump, instead of Black war hero – report
One week after Donald Trump ordered his navy secretary to redesign a new aircraft carrier, the USS Doris Miller – to scrap the modern electromagnetic system used to launch fighter jets, and install old-fashioned steam-powered catapults instead – CNN reports that the navy is considering another change to the same ship: removing the name of Miller, a Black sailor known for his heroism during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and naming it instead the USS Donald Trump.
The language of Trump’s executive order last week, demanding the change back to steam catapults, perhaps offered a hint that the name chosen during his first term, to honor Doris “Dorie” Miller, might be changed. The order did not refer to the ship at any point as the Miller, instead using just its hull number, CVN-81.
According to an official biography on the US Department of Veterans Affairs website, Miller joined the US Navy in 1939 “as a mess attendant one of the only occupational specialties then open to a Black man”. During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941:
Miller, on his own initiative, loaded and manned an unattended gun and fired at incoming Japanese planes. Although untrained, he laid down effective fire and stopped firing when he ran out of ammunition and the ship began to sink. Even then, he persisted in helping his fellow sailors to safety until he finally made his way to shore.
Anna Betts
A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.
The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”
Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, touted Median polling data after it appeared to put her ahead of her election challenger by more than 10 percentage points. The poll was also cited by the California Post. A widely followed polling aggregator on X also shared the group’s Nevada poll, although several credible polling organizations did not aggregate Median polling because they could not verify its methodology.
“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not,” said Prakash. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.”
He added: “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this.”
Raman is running against Bass in November’s LA mayoral election. Hong lost the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor earlier this month, after Median suggested she had led the race by more than 20 percentage points. It also released a fake poll showing the Nevada governor, Joe Lombardo, up by five points before November’s general election.
In an interview, Prakash said he was motivated to start the fake polling project after a significant polling miss in the Michigan Senate primary, where polls had showed Abdul El-Sayed with a heavy lead over his opponent Haley Stevens before election day. In the event, El-Sayed wound up winning by a much smaller margin than polls had suggested.
“This is what inspired me to test my theory,” said Prakash. “I was a bit shocked, perhaps at how fast this sort of information can spread.”
Joseph Gedeon
The US treasury department announced sanctions on Thursday against 10 people it says formed a courier network that smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah by carrying cash onboard commercial flights between Iran, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon.
The office of foreign assets control (OFAC) said the network allowed Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group,to obtain foreign currency and dodge sanctions outside the formal banking system. The treasury department linked the operation to a scheme once associated with Behnam Shahriyari, a now-deceased finance official for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.
At the center of the network, according to the department, is Yunus Alper Yilmaz, a Turkish businessman accused of running the courier operation and using Turkish-based currency exchange houses as fronts, along with shell companies and bank accounts tied to the IRGC-QF. Two men accused of collecting cash from those exchange houses on his behalf, Halil Ibrahim Kacmaz and Onder Dede, were designated, as was Vasfi Akyuz, described as a logistics coordinator who also worked as a courier.
Six others – Mehmet Akyuz, Mehmet Acur, Feyyad Karasalih, Masoud Mousafar, Gulay Kaya Savci and Emrah Ayaz – are accused of physically carrying the cash to Lebanon on commercial flights. None of the 10 appear to be public or widely known figures.
The action lands amid a sharp rise in tensions between Turkey and Israel this week, after Israeli airstrikes on a Syrian airbase near Aleppo prompted Ankara to accuse Israel of using the incident as a pretext to violate Syrian sovereignty. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, warned Turkey against expanding its military footprint in Syria.
David Smith
The White House faced fresh questions on Thursday over whether Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, had access to US government secrets without security clearance.
Harp, who is executive assistant to the US president, worked at the White House for a year without the routine clearance, the MS Now network reported on Thursday. She refused to file the relevant forms for unknown reasons, according to two unnamed sources cited by MS Now.
It was only when the White House counsel’s office raised the issue, and when Trump himself became involved, that Harp filled out the paperwork for a federal background investigation and was belatedly granted clearance, according to the report.
Norm Eisen, a former White House ethics tsar, said: “It is shocking that an aide who has potential exposure to the nation’s most sensitive secrets reportedly went without a security clearance for so long. Treating access to confidences as a casual job perk is an outrageous way to handle our national security.”
Eisen, co-founder of Democracy Defenders Action, a non-partisan group dedicated to free and fair elections, added: “This is the continued incompetence of an administration willing to set aside our country’s interests, ignore established protocol, and make the White House vulnerable to intelligence risks in order to appease Trump. The American people deserve answers.”
Harp’s influence has come under close scrutiny this week after her name was invoked by Jon Ossoff, a Democratic US senator for Georgia.
Harp has reportedly sent the US president adoring letters, helps him write social media posts, and has been dubbed “the human printer” because she supplies him with printouts of favourable coverage.
The MS Now report about her prolonged lack of security clearance drew criticism among former White House officials across the political spectrum.
Election forecaster now rates both Texas and Iowa Senate races as toss ups
The non-partisan Cook Political Report updated its midterm election forecast on Thursday to rate the US Senate races in both Texas and Iowa, which had leaned in favor of Republicans, as toss ups that could break for Democrats.
The forecaster’s analyst for Senate and governor’s races, Jessica Taylor, noted the political climate is starting to look like the sort of “wave election” in which Democrats could win races even in states that voted for Donald Trump by more than 13 points in 2024.
To explain the updated forecast giving Democrats a chance to gain Senate seats in the two states, Taylor cited “both public and private polling showing both races to be more competitive”.
The most recent Fox News of the races showed Texas Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton 51%-48% and Iowa Democrat Josh Turek leading Republican Ashley Hinson 50% -46%.
“With these ratings shifts, we see the overall battle for the Senate as a toss up, but one in which Republicans may still hold the slimmest of advantages,” Taylor added.
Overall, the Cook Political Report now rates three of the nine competitive Senate races as favoring Democrats, with six rated as toss ups. Should Democrats sweep all those races, they would be on track to win a 53-47 Senate majority.
The forecaster also suggested that the governors’ races in both states are within reach for Democrats. In Iowa, Cook now rates the race for governor as leaning in favor of the Democrat, Rob Sand, and in Texas, the incumbent governor, Greg Abbott, is now just narrowly favored to win re-election against Democratic state lawmaker Gina Hinojosa.
Sand, the Iowa state auditor, held a lead over Republican Zach Lahn, a businessman and farmer, of between one and nine percentage points in recent polls.
A Fox poll last month showed Abbott leading Hinojosa by a single point, 50%-49%.
The Rose Garden event to promote Melania Trump’s advocacy for foster children concluded with executives from IndyCar and Fox presenting her with an oversized novelty check for a $2 million donation to fund scholarships at Indiana University and Purdue University.
During the event, the first lady, who joked about her lack of recent public appearances, spoke about her desire to help young people from the foster care community go to college. Her remarks were followed by largely self-promotional speeches by executives from IndyCar and Fox.
Her husband, Donald Trump, attended the event but did not speak. He seemed less than riveted by the proceedings.
“The greatest investment America can make is not in technology, infrastructure or capital markets,” she says. “It’s our children.”
