Trump backs Pete Hegseth amid renewed tensions with Iran – live

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.

The president did vote in person in Palm Beach in the 2020 general election, 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.

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.

Donald Trump has told the crowd at General Motors Proving Grounds in Milford, Michigan, that ​the US has been ⁠having “very friendly” talks with Iran.

You ⁠can’t bribe them. ​You’ve ‌got ‌to beat them, ‌and we’ll beat the hell out of them. But we’ll ‌see how it turns out. Right now, ⁠there are very ​friendly negotiations going ​on.

Former FBI director James Comey urged a judge today to throw out federal charges against him, arguing that a photo of seashells arranged on a beach he posted on social media was not a call to violence against Donald Trump but protected political speech.

Comey’s lawyers argue the government cannot prove the photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47” constituted a “true threat” against the president, who fired Comey in 2017 and has publicly called for his prosecution. The slogan has long meant to “get rid of” or “eject”, and Trump is the 47th president.

The justice department previously tried and failed to bring a separate case against Comey. After that federal prosecutors focused on the 2025 social media post featuring the seashells spelling out “86 47”. Comeuy captioned the post: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

“But the government now singles out Mr Comey to prosecute one of the President’s most prominent critics for publishing another person’s statement of political opposition,” his attorney’s wrote. “That attempt to suppress core political speech contravenes both the statutes at issue and the First Amendment.”

Comey’s attorneys argued that to be a “true threat” under the law, his post would have needed to communicate a “serious expression” that he was going to commit violence.

“No reasonable observer who was aware of the relevant context would read the phrase ‘86 47’ to connote violence against the President,” Comey’s attorneys wrote. “But even if ‘86 47’ could implausibly be read to suggest violence, a reasonable observer would still understand Mr Comey’s post as mere political hyperbole, not a true threat.”

The justice department has not elaborated on any evidence of intent the government has. The case is due to go to trial in October.

Donald Trump is speaking now at General Motors Proving Grounds in Milford, Michigan. I’ll bring you all the key lines from his remarks here.

The latest revelations of the Democratic party’s intensifying financial troubles and organizational dysfunction include that the Democratic National Committee put its physical Washington DC headquarters up for collateral last year in order to obtain a $15m line of credit to help invest in off-year elections, Notus reports citing DC deed records.

The DNC said this was “not new” as it has done so to get loans in multiple previous years. However, one DNC member told Notus: “[DNC chair] Ken [Martin] is gaslighting us about the DNC’s finances and not being transparent about the financial situation makes us doubt if he can oversee the DNC during the most important primary of our lifetime.”

Another Democrat close to Martin told Notus he had struggled to convince donors to maximize their contributions, which had contributed to the small cash-on-hand total.

Adding to the party’s financial woes, the New York Times (paywall) reports that the DNC is also asking vendors not to send bills until after the midterm elections, which are less than 100 days away.

Roger Lau, the executive director of the DNC, told the Times in a statement that the bill-deferral discussions were “nothing more than standard negotiations with vendors over contracts and payment processes”.

It’s an increasingly fraught time for Martin, who is under particularly close scrutiny after becoming the subject of an internal HR inquiry after throwing a phone in the direction of a young aide in early July.

The incident almost cost him his job and he finds himself increasingly paranoid and isolated within the party at a time when the DNC finds itself $2m in debt, the NYT reports. So much so that he’s completely stopped holding staff-wide meetings since the incident, berating staff in May: “It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building … No more.”

Trust in Martin had already been waning following his botched handling of a long-promised autopsy of the 2024 election that ultimately failed to address what actually went wrong for the party – from Gaza to the Biden-Harris transition – and amid growing scepticism owing to disappointing fundraising numbers.

Last week, he defended the state of the DNC’s finances in an op-ed on Substack, writing that the committee had made the “conscious decision” to invest the cash it raises into “electoral assets: more people, earlier organizing, better technology, and stronger state parties”.

He said the DNC had “done exceptionally better with high-net worth donors”, citing an increase of donations from major donors relative to comparable years. “We must measure success by power built, not simply dollars retained,” he added.

Meanwhile, with Martin refusing to quit, rumors continue to swirl about a possible no-confidence vote from senior Democrats to oust him, as the party tries to reverse its fortunes ahead of the crucial midterms.

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.

The president also reiterated what he earlier told Axios, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that the ⁠United States was having “good talks” with Iran and there was a chance of a deal over their conflict, but warned strikes would ⁠resume if the negotiations failed to deliver.

“We’re talking right now,” he said. “We’re having good ‌talks … I think there’s a good chance that something could happen, and if it does, good, if it doesn’t, we go back to doing what we were doing two days ago.”

During a gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One earlier, Donald Trump dismissed concerns that US ammunition stockpiles are running low after five months of bombing Iran.

“We’re building that up,” he said. “But we have a lot. We have a lot of the mid-level stuff, too. I mean, more than we could ever use no matter what. But we have a lot. I’d like to have more, to be honest, but so much was given to Ukraine by Biden.”

Reactions to a Senate candidate’s description of a potential victory as putting an “ogre on a pike” have begun to reverberate across Michigan politics on Monday morning.

Abdul El-Sayed made the comment on a Zoom conference call with donors, as reported by Politico. The Democratic candidate had been discussing the message his progressive victory might send across the national political scene, given the amount of Aipac spending – at least $30m – that had been spent in support of his relatively moderate primary opponent, US Representative Haley Stevens.

“Calling your female opponent an ogre you want to put on a pike is not beating the rap that this race has some serious sexism,” wrote Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and a regular critic of El-Sayed, on the social media platform X.

El-Sayed’s media representatives have not yet returned an email seeking comment.

Politico reported that a campaign spokesperson said El-Sayed was “speaking metaphorically” about support for a primary opponent against US Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whose legislative support for Israel has made him a progressive target. Fetterman is bald, stands six-foot-eight and weighs about 270 pounds, and had been referred to as an “ogre” by Kari Lake, a rightwing figure of Arizona politics.

Early voting in the Michigan primary began on Saturday. El-Sayed and Stevens have a final Democratic Senate debate on Monday night.

GOP senator Mitch McConnell’s office has released a health update saying he is still not ready to return to in-person work in the Capitol following his hospitalization on 14 June after a fall.

“I’m still working hard to get back to my full schedule of work in the Senate and in Kentucky, keeping up with intense physical therapy per my doctors’ orders,” McConnell, 84, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, that means I won’t be able to make it to Fancy Farm, Kentucky this Saturday.”

A note from the office of the attending physician added: “Senator McConnell continues his recovery from a fall at home in June. OAP physicians visit with the Senator every day, discussing all aspects of his rehabilitation care. Since his discharge from hospital care, he has maintained a strenuous course of physical therapy and rehabilitation, including multiple sessions a day designed to rebuild strength and reduce the risk of future falls. His bout with childhood polio continues to be a significant factor in his mobility. He is not yet medically cleared to leave the rehab facility and return to the office.”

On that subject, the US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, insisted to NBC News’ Meet the Press yesterday that the United States military has “everything that it needs” for military operations against Iran, dismissing reporting that US weapons stockpiles are depleted.

“I want to be crystal clear: The US military, and I’ve verified this every which way, has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he said. “And I have to tell you, the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

NBC News reported on Friday that US military commanders were allowing some Iranian attacks through US defenses as part of an effort to preserve the Pentagon’s weapons supply, citing two senior US officials.