‘That’s bullshit’: Democrats slam Trump’s claims that Iran hostilities ‘have been terminated’ – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of Louisiana voting rights groups, asking a state court to block the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, and secretary of state, Nancy Landry, from suspending congressional elections.

• Senate Democrats called BS, literally, on Donald Trump’s claim that the war in Iran is over, in a formal letter the president sent on Friday to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate. “That’s bullshit,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, posted in response to the news. “This is an illegal war”.

• A US appeals court temporarily blocked a federal rule allowing the abortion drug mifepristone to be dispensed through the mail, significantly curtailing access to the drug nationwide and particularly in states that have banned abortion.

• The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops from Nato ally Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, days after Trump lambasted the German chancellor for saying the US was “being humiliated” by Iran’s leadership.

• The Republican governors of Tennessee and Alabama called special legislative sessions for next week to give Republican state lawmakers the chance to redraw congressional district boundaries ahead of elections for Congress in November.

• Trump delivered a pair of rambling speeches to friendly crowds in Florida, in which he repeated a large number of previously debunked false claims and reiterated his racist comments about Somali Americans.

During his now concluded remarks on Friday night in Palm Beach, Donald Trump briefly referenced the failed assassination attempt last weekend at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

“Consequential people get in a lot of danger,” Trump said. “You know what I’m talking about, Saturday night. It was good for one thing: people are loving my ballroom now, that’s the only thing. They love my ballroom. They love my ballroom. It’s going to be the best in the world, although I like the one at Mar-a-Lago very much too”.

In a brief question and answer session after his speech at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, Donald Trump was asked to name a moment from the founding of the United States that stays with him.

After first stalling, by describing his idea to give US troops a bonus of $1,776, Trump landed on an old favorite of his: the story of what he claims, despite a total lack of evidence, was the warning confederate general Robert E Lee issued to his commanders at Gettysburg. “It was, ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They fought uphill and they just got wiped out,” the president said.

“But to me, that while, the Robert E Lee era, with Ulysses S Grant, Abraham Lincoln, I mean, to me, that is such an amazing- you can learn so much from it, but it was such an amazing time. Such a horrible time. Beautiful in certain ways, but such a horrible, horrible time,” Trump added.

The comments were a very much condensed version of a riff Trump has given before, notably in 2024 when he was widely mocked for apparently inventing a saying no historian ever recorded during a rally speech in Pennsylvania.

Trump cited the same imaginary tale during a campaign speech in 2020 in Minnesota, in which he criticized protesters who called for the removal of statues of Lee.

In an aside during his just completed hour-long speech in Palm Beach, Donald Trump mentioned an architect who comes from Cuba, and added, “which we will be taking over almost immediately”.

The crowd laughed, but Trump gave no indication that he was joking.

“Cuba’s got problems,” he continued. “We’ll finish one first, I like to finish a job.”

“What we’ll do, on the way back from Iran, we’ll have one of our big, maybe the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the biggest in the world, we’ll have that come in, stop about a hundred yards off shore and they’ll say, ‘Thanks you very much, we give up.’”

Donald Trump’s stand-up tour of Florida has moved on to the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, where is currently speaking.

He has repeated much of the same material from his earlier set at the Villages, and even provided live commentary in the fact that certain material went over better there.

The president said that a temporary, 5,000-seat arena is being built at the White House for a UFC fight “for the 250th” anniversary of American independence.

“That’s going to be June 14th, which is my birthday,” Trump said, “and that’s a coincidence, it is not- I didn’t do that, it just worked out that way, it is actually true, I swear, I did not do it, it worked out that way, but it’s June 14th, at least it’s easy to remember… It’s going to be a Sunday night, it’s going to be on CBS.”

“Then they’re having anywhere from 75 to 100,000 people in the park, right across from the White House, its a beautiful circular park, ellipse,” he added, without mentioning that that was also the location of the speech he gave to supporters on January 6 2021 before they stormed the Capitol in support of his lie that he had not lost the 2020 election.

In a statement, Louisiana’s anti-abortion attorney general, Liz Murrill, welcomed a ruling on Friday by the fifth US circuit court of appeals in New Orleans that blocked a Biden-era federal rule allowing the abortion drug mifepristone to be dispensed through the mail.

“The Biden abortion cartel facilitated the deaths of thousands of Louisiana babies (and millions in other states) through illegal mail-order abortion pills,” Murrill said. “Today, that nightmare is over, thanks to the hard work of my office and our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom. I look forward to continuing to defend women and babies as this case continues”.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the well-funded conservative legal advocacy group behind the overturning of Roe v Wade, also scored a significant victory at the US supreme court last month when it successfully challenged a Colorado law that prohibited mental health professionals from trying to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQP+ minors through so-called “conversion therapy”.

Democrats expressed outrage over the court ruling on mifepristone.

“A conservative court packed with Trump-appointed judges just ruled to ROLL BACK access to the abortion pill,” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren posted on Bluesky. “This is a page straight out of extremist Republicans’ anti-abortion playbook. Let me be clear: the abortion pill is safe and effective. We must fight back.”

California congressman Ro Khanna also denounced the restrictions on mifepristone.

“Under no circumstances can women’s body autonomy be up for debate,” Khanna posted. “This decision was purely political, and not rooted in any science or support for women’s reproductive health. The Democratic Party must use every lever of power at our disposal to protect women and provide resources for those seeking access to abortions.”

A US appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked a federal rule allowing the abortion drug mifepristone to be dispensed through the mail, significantly curtailing access to the drug nationwide and particularly in states that have banned abortion, Reuters reports.

A panel of the fifth US circuit court of appeals in New Orleans said the state of Louisiana was likely to prevail in its challenge to the 2023 rule adopted by former president Joe Biden’s administration.

While the ruling is temporary, it is the first to significantly curtail access to mifepristone in a series of lawsuits challenging the drug’s initial approval in 2000 and subsequent rules making it easier to obtain. The 2023 regulation removed a requirement that mifepristone be dispensed in person.

The Republican governors of Tennessee and Alabama called special legislative sessions for next week to give Republican state lawmakers the chance to redraw congressional district boundaries ahead of elections for Congress in November.

Governors Bill Lee and Kay Ivey acted to take advantage of this week’s US supreme court decision that effectively legalized the use of extreme gerrymandering in order to dilute the voting power of racial minorities.

The court gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Right Act, a central achievement of the civil rights movement, that prevented racial discrimination in the conduct of elections.

“We owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters,” Lee said in a statement calling the legislature back into session next Tuesday. “I believe the General Assembly has a responsibility to review the map and ensure it remains fair, legal, and defensible.”

“Following the successful 2020 census, Alabama maintained our representation in Congress, and I called a special session to redraw our maps. Since then, we have been battling federal courts and activist groups who think they know Alabama better than Alabama,” Ivey said in a statement on the session she called for Monday. “Alabama’s redistricting battle is not over. The state remains under a court order prohibiting the use of new congressional maps until after the 2030 census.”

“By calling the Legislature into a special session, I am ensuring Alabama is prepared should the courts act quickly enough to allow Alabama’s previously drawn congressional and state senate maps to be used during this election cycle. If the court-ordered injunction is lifted, Alabama would revert to the maps drawn by the Legislature for congressional districts in 2023 and state senate districts in 2021,” the Alabama governor added.

Donald Trump said in a letter sent to congressional leaders on Friday that hostilities with Iran have “terminated”, suggesting that the 60-day deadline to seek approval from the legislative branch no longer applied.

Friday marks 60 days since the US president notified members of Congress that the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran on 28 February. Under the War Powers Act of 1973, the president can deploy troops to respond to an “imminent threat” but must receive congressional approval within 60 days to continue military operations.

In the letter, dated 1 May, Trump said he initiated Operation Epic Fury against Iran and notified Congress on 28 February “consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests at home and abroad, and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests”.

“On April 7, 2026, I ordered a 2-week ceasefire,” the letter, addressed to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, continues. “The ceasefire has since been extended. There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.”

The letter effectively waves off the 1 May legal deadline, which was already expected to lapse without intervention from Republican lawmakers, most of whom have been reluctant to challenge the president’s unilateral use of force.

As he departed the White House on Friday, Trump told reporters that he had no intention of seeking congressional approval for the military campaign because “it’s never been sought before” and suggested the War Powers Act was “totally unconstitutional”.

Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, posted a withering response to the latest remarks about her, and Somali Americans, from Donald Trump.

“This unhinged rant would solicit anger if it wasn’t coming from a criminal, who has 34 felony convictions, held accountable for rape and accused of being a pedo,” Omar wrote on social media aboce video of Trump’s remarks in Florida on Friday. “I still don’t know how anyone would willingly humiliate themselves like this but here we are. Btw, the pedophile protection party should find new material for their deflection”.

The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops from Nato ally Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, the Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told Reuters and Fox News on Friday.

“The Secretary of War has ordered the withdrawal of approximately 5,000 troops from Germany,” Parnell said in a statement to Fox News. “This decision follows a thorough review of the Department’s force posture in Europe and is in recognition of theater requirements and conditions on the ground. We expect the withdrawal to be completed over the next six to twelve months.”

Donald Trump had threatened a drawdown in forces earlier this week after the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told students on Monday “the Americans clearly have no strategy” for ending the war and that “an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership”.

The planned withdrawal would reduce US forces in Germany by nearly 15%. Germany is the US military’s biggest basing location in Europe, with some 35,000 active-duty military personnel, and serves as a key training hub.

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters recent German rhetoric had been “inappropriate and unhelpful.”

“The president is rightly reacting to these counterproductive remarks,” the official said.

The Pentagon said the withdrawal was expected to be completed over the next six to twelve months.

Merz has said Germany and other US allies in Europe were not consulted before the US and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February, and that he had conveyed his skepticism about the conflict directly to Trump.

“The president has been very clear about his frustrations about our allies’ rhetoric and failure to provide support for U.S. operations that benefit them,” the senior Pentagon official said.

Donald Trump’s rambling speech to supporters in Florida has just concluded and he left the stage doing his familiar impersonation of someone dancing to the strains of YMCA by the Village People, which he referred to earlier as “the gay national anthem”.

I started to write that this line might have been the only new thing he said during the entire 90 minute speech, but I thought to check and it turns out that he did previously use the phrase in a podcast interview with the Nelk Boys in 2022 and again in a telephone interview with the Fox News host Jesse Watters this year.

Otherwise, the speech was a rehash of comments he has made for years, including familiar attacks on Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, CBS News and the BBC based on easily disproven false claims.

“Let’s not talk about anything until it gets finished,” Trump said about Iran.

As the Associated Press reports, Trump made a series of familiar false claims about his policies. The president, for instance, claimed to have eliminated taxes on social security benefits, when in reality his signature legislative package only reduced the portion of social security recipients who pay no tax on those payments by about 4 percentage points.

Donald Trump’s remarks to seniors in Florida are still going, but if you haven’t had time to tune in, don’t worry, the president is mostly saying nothing new, merely reciting what he thinks of his greatest hits, in a speech made up almost entirely of boasts, lies and attacks on his rivals he has made in previous speeches.

At one point, the president boasted about his performance on cognitive tests, confusing them with intelligence tests, in the exact same terms he had posted on social media this week.

The president, who instructed his lawyer ahead of his 2016 campaign to threaten officials at the high school and colleges he attended with jail if they revealed his grades, then repeated a false claim he has made before about Barack Obama having been admitted to Harvard Law School despite bad grades as an undergraduate at Columbia. Before he ran for president, Trump pivoted from demanding that Obama release his birth certificate, which he did, to demanding that he release his college transcript.

Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, which means his grade point average was in the top 10% of his class, and told a biographer that his grade point average at Columbia was 3.7.

He then went on to mock Democrats for drawing attention to the affordability crisis his policies have exacerbated, first through tariffs and now through the attack on Iran that has spiked fuel prices.

“The Democrats start screaming, ‘Affordability! Affordability!’ They’re the ones that caused the problem,” Trump said, putting on a comic accent as he pronounced the word “affordability”. “I’ll tell you what, they got one good line of bullshit,” the president added.

In one disturbing passage, Trump again attacked Somali Americans, in clearly racist terms.

“Somalia, it’s a beautiful place,” the president said with sarcasm. “It’s got no anything. It’s got one thing that’s really strong: crime. It’s got a lot of crime. They have no police. All they do is run around shooting each other. It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty. It’s a horrible place. They come here, and Ilhan Omar, you ever hear of her? She heads it.”

“Think of it,” the president said, riling up the crowd against the Minnesota congresswoman he has been singling out for racist abuse since his first term. “And then she comes here, from Somalia, and she tells us how to run the United States of America,” the president said to a chorus of boos from his supporters.

“She says, ‘the constitution gives me certain rights,’” the president said of the elected lawmaker, putting on, for some reason, a faux English accent. “Get the hell out, what a phony!”

As the crowd roared, the president mixed a lie with a viral conspiracy theory. “She married her brother to come in,” Trump claimed, falsely. Omar came to the US as a refugee from Somalia and obtained citizenship before briefly marrying a man she has insisted is not her brother and who is a British citizen. Despite years on scrutiny from reporters and rightwing bloggers, no evidence to support the viral claim that Omar married her brother has been found.

“Isn’t she despicable?” Trump asked. “Their whole life is based on fraud and a scam,” the president said of Somali Americans. “The whole thing is a scam and we ought to get those people the hell out of our country,” he said, to wild applause.

Donald Trump is speaking to seniors in Florida now, against a background emblazoned with the words “Golden Age for your Golden Years”.

Before the president, who turns 80 in six weeks, took the stage to speak to his elderly supporters, the crowd was treated to a rally playlist that included the song Live and Let Die. The same song was previously a feature of Trump’s pre-speech playlist during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

In his rambling remarks, which the president himself noted was an example of the sort of wild swings in topic he has called “the weave”, the president repeated a number of previously debunked false claims, including:

• that 60 Minutes had broadcast an interview with Kamala Harris “the night before the election” in 2024 in which they replaced her answer to one question with an answer to a different question, to make her sound more coherent. In fact, the 60 Minutes interview with Harris was broadcast a month before the election and the answer Harris gave was edited, so that only part of what she said was used in the broadcast. Such editing is routine and, earlier this week, 60 Minutes edited out multiple long, rambling answers Trump gave during an interview on Sunday.

• that the BBC used AI to put words in his mouth that he never said in a documentary that quoted his speech to supporters before they stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021. “BBC has me AI, saying about hate. ‘We hate, we hate.’ I said, ‘That’s not me.’ They changed my lips. I couldn’t even tell myself,” Trump said. In fact, the BBC did not use AI and did not put words in Trump’s mouth. The broadcaster spliced together two parts of Trump’s remarks in a misleading edit that made it seem as if statements made early and late in the speech formed part of a single statement. The BBC has apologized for the edit, but Trump filed suit.

• that “25 million illegal aliens” were allowed to enter the United States during the Biden administration. In fact, according to estimates from the Center for Migration Studies of New York in 2024, just 10.9 million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, based on Census Bureau and American Community Service data. The Department of Homeland Security, had produced a similar estimate, that has now been removed from the web. About 40% of the undocumented population are also estimated to have overstayed their visas. The same estimate suggested number of undocumented in the US increased by just 650,000 from 2020 to 2022.

• that the administration has “removed 300,000 illegal aliens from the Social Security rolls and we’ve removed more than 100,000 migrants from Medicare eligibility”. In fact, the 2025 tax and spending law Trump signed passed by Republicans in Congress restricted access to affordable health care tax credits for many low-income immigrants considered “lawfully present”, including green card holders in their first five years of residency and people with temporary statuses. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, 300,000 lawfully present immigrants with low incomes were disqualified from those tax credits.

• that Trump got “97%” of the vote in the part of Florida the event was held in, The Villages, in the 2024 election. In fact, Trump took 68% of the vote in 2024 in Sumter County, where most of the sprawling retirement community is located.

Senate Democrats called BS, literally, on Donald Trump’s claim that the war in Iran is over, in a formal letter the president sent on Friday to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate.

“There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026 have been terminated,” Trump wrote, as the ongoing war he claimed the US won in the first hour of combat continues with competing Iranian and US blockades of the Persian gulf.

“That’s bullshit,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, posted in response to the news. “This is an illegal war and every day Republicans remain complicit and allow it to continue is another day lives are endangered, chaos erupts, and prices increase, all while Americans foot the bill.”

Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking member of the Senate armed services committee, agreed.

“President Trump declaring the war with Iran ‘terminated’ doesn’t reflect the reality that tens of thousands of U.S. service members in the region are still in harm’s way, that the Administration continually threatens to escalate hostilities or that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and prices are skyrocketing at home,” Shaheen wrote. “President Trump entered this war without a strategy and without legal authorization and today’s announcement doesn’t change either fact.”

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of Louisiana voting rights groups today, asking a state court to block the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, and secretary of state, Nancy Landry, from suspending congressional elections.

Landry suspended the state’s congressional primary election yesterday – even after early voting had begun – to enact new districts for the 2026 election. The move came after the supreme court’s 6-3 decision in the Louisiana v Callais case on Wednesday, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act and declared that a Louisiana congressional district with a majority-nonwhite voting population violated equal protection provisions of the US constitution.

Other races on the ballot, as well as votes for amendments to Louisiana’s constitution, will continue, according to Landry’s order. While the congressional race will remain on the ballot, its votes will not be counted, Landry ordered.

The League of Women Voters of Louisiana, the Louisiana state conference of the NAACP, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, and three individual voters filed suit in a state court in Baton Rouge today, seeking a temporary restraining order. They argued that an order delaying an election had only previously been issued “due to natural disasters or similar emergencies that posed threats to health and safety”, and that a supreme court decision did not constitute state of emergency under Louisiana law.

“Furthermore, the executive order sows chaos into an already-confusing election and puts Louisianians’ votes at risk, especially those who have already cast absentee ballots,” the NAACP said in a prepared statement.

Donald Trump said in letters sent to Congress today stating that, due to the ceasefire, he doesn’t need congressional authorization for military operations in Iran – despite the conflict reaching the 60-day mark this week and despite US armed forces remaining in the region – and that he considers the war “terminated”.

“On April 7, 2026, I ordered a two-week ceasefire. The ceasefire has since been extended. There has been no exchange of fire between the United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated,” Trump wrote in the letters, one of which was sent to the House and one to the Senate.

But he also suggested the war isn’t actually over, adding:

Despite the success of United States operations against the Iranian regime and continued efforts to secure a lasting peace, the threat posed by Iran to the United States and our Armed Forces remains significant.

I have and will continue to direct United States Armed Forces consistent with my responsibilities and pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.

Donald Trump said earlier that he was not satisfied with the latest Iranian proposal for talks on the Iran war, while Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran was ready for diplomacy if the United States changes its approach.

It comes after Iranian state media and a Pakistani official said Iran had submitted its latest proposal for negotiations, raising some hope that a deadlock in efforts to end the war might be broken.

“They want to make a deal, but … I’m not satisfied with it,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House to head to Florida, adding that the Iranian leadership was “very disjointed” and split into two or three groups.

Trump also praised Pakistan’s mediation efforts, saying negotiations by phone were continuing.

“They’ve made strides, but I’m not sure if they ever get there,” Trump said. “They’re asking for things that I can’t agree to.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said his country was ready to pursue diplomacy if the United States changes what he called its “excessive approach, threatening rhetoric and provocative actions”.

However, Araghchi added in a post on his Telegram channel that “Iran’s armed forces remained ready to defend the country against any threat”.