Trump claims strict voter ID act should be ‘easy pass’ but says ‘we need Democrat votes’ – as it happened

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

• A senior federal judge blocked the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that bars reporters who refused to sign a pledge to only publish authorized information.

• Confronted with increasing oil prices as a result of the joint US and Israeli attack on Iran, the treasury department’s office of foreign assets control is temporarily lifting sanctions on Iranian oil sales.

• Donald Trump said this week that he was “shocked” by Iran’s response to being attacked by the United States and Israel. “Nobody expected it.” But one expert on Iran, who left the White House National Security Council last year after the conservative activist Laura Loomer asked Trump to fire him, publicly predicted Iran’s response in an article four days before Trump started the war.

• US Southern Command announced that US forces carried out another “ lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific.

• The Trump administration is considering occupying or blockading Iran’s Kharg Island to pressure Iran into reopening the strait of Hormuz, according to Axios.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump sought to cast Iran’s response to being attacked by the US and Israel as impossible to predict.

“They hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait. Nobody expected it. We were shocked. They fought back,” the president told reporters on Monday.

Asked later if he was “surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time that that might be their retaliation?” Trump replied: “Nobody. Nobody. No, no, no. No, the greatest experts – nobody thought they were going hit – I wouldn’t say friendly countries, they were like neutral.”

However, there was at least one person who did publicly predict that possible response from Iran, four days before Trump announced the US attack.

Writing on the website of Foreign Affairs on 24 February, Nate Swanson, who severed as a director for Iran on the National Security Council from 2022 until 2025, and took part in talks with Iran led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner last year, wrote:

Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships transiting the Red Sea. The country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to selectively seize adversary ships in the Strait of Hormuz. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly. In 2019, during Trump’s last “maximum pressure” campaign, Iran directly attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, the world’s largest. That assault appeared to be designed to damage easily replaceable components, thus limiting the consequences to the global energy supply. But if Tehran instead assaulted infrastructure that it knows would take longer to repair, the results would be much more damaging. The relationships between Iran and the Gulf Arab states are stronger now than they were then, but Tehran knows that Gulf leaders carry real influence with Trump and could appeal to him to back down if they came under pressure.

Iran may be weak. But it still has ways to inflict real pain on the United States—and much more incentive to try than it did before.

In an interview with Foreign Affairs a week into the attack, Swanson, who joined the state department during the George W Bush administration, said that there essentially was no National Security Council in the Trump White House now.

The Trump administration definitely does decision-making differently. I mean… from Bush on, you had really a system set up where the National Security Council would basically coordinate amongst different agencies and then kind of bring all these different voices to the president to make decisions. And this administration is definitely different than even the first Trump administration where you still had that process…

I do think the president relies on a very small group of advisers to make decisions. These are relatively well-known. Secretary [of State] Rubio, [Special Envoy] Steve Witkoff, [White House Chief of Staff] Susie Wiles, the Vice President JD Vance. So, I mean, he relies on these people for advice. So it’s not like he’s doing this all on his own. But I think what is unique is the process is just different. You can see a scenario where maybe he’s not getting all the information he needs.

And I think second, though, is, also unique to the president himself, is he likes to be lobbied and pitched on ideas. So he’s very willing to take information from outside sources as equally valuable.

Swanson left the White House in 2025, after Laura Loomer, the far-right activist with influence over Trump, mounted a determined campaign to have him fired by Trump, for, supposedly having contributed to Barack Obama in 2012, and then taken part in the diplomatic effort that led to the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.

“President Trump’s mandate is clear: restore strength, accountability, and patriotism to our government. Nathanael Swanson, with his entrenched Democrat ties, Obama-era promotions, and involvement in the disastrous Iran deal, represents the kind of bureaucratic resistance that undermines this mission,” Loomer wrote on 27 May 2025.

“To protect America’s interests and ensure a foreign policy that puts our nation first while taking the Islamist threat of Iran seriously, President Trump must act decisively to remove Swanson from the Iran negotiation team”.

One month later, Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian enrichment facilities and claimed to have “obliterated” its nuclear program.

Eight months after that, Trump decided to launch an all-out assault on Iran during renewed talks, and the Iranians responded in exactly the way Swanson predicted.

The hyperactive press office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, criticized Donald Trump, and the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, for lifting sanctions on Iranian oil exports on Friday in response to spiking oil prices caused by the US assault on Iran, and Iran’s retaliatory move to close the strait of Hormuz, choking off 20% of the world’s oil supply.

“This is blood oil,” Newsom wrote on social media. “Trump and Bessent have betrayed the American people and our soldiers.”

Earlier this week, when he was asked, at an event related to his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, about Iran creating havoc in the global oil market by closing the strait of Hormuz in response to being attacked by the US and Israel, Donald Trump suggested Iran shutting down up to one-fifth of the world’s supply of oil and gas was really not his problem.

After noting that other countries, like China and Japan, were much more reliant on oil imports through what he called “the straits”, Trump said: “It always bothered me that we’re protecting them, and we don’t need ‘em.”

“We didn’t need ‘em before we started, uh, ‘dig we must’. Uh, ‘dig me wust’ [sic], that’s the Trump policy of lots of oil,” the president said after apparently reaching for and failing to find his campaign slogan, “Drill, baby, drill” in the recesses of his memory.

The fact that the president apparently forgot the three-word slogan for the unchecked exploitation of oil resources that he had mentioned in his inaugural address last year, and in a speech last month, led some observers to suggest that the slip was evidence that the nearly 80-year-old president now leading the US in war is in cognitive decline.

Some support for that theory was offered by the commentator Keith Olbermann who pointed out that “Dig we must – for a growing New York” was a slogan used by Con Edison, the New York City utility company, when it had to dig up the streets in Trump’s childhood. That slogan can still be seen online in a New York Daily News photograph from 1957, when Trump was 11, and in a documentary by Shirley Clarke about the construction of a skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue, when Trump was 13. (That skyscraper would later be owned by, and nearly ruin, the family of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.)

But digging back into the recesses of recent political history for the origins of the slogan “Drill, baby, drill” reveals that, when it was popularized by Sarah Palin during her failed 2008 campaign for the vice-presidency, it was a call for US energy independence motivated, in part, by an awareness of how easy it would be for Iran to close the strait of Hormuz and cut off 20% of the world’s oil and gas.

In her 2008 convention speech, Palin said that American energy independence was necessary for many reasons, the first of which was, “To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of world energy supplies”.

A month later, in the 2008 vice-presidential debate, after Joe Biden criticized the McCain-Palin ticket for ignoring alternative energy sources and suggesting “the only answer is drill, drill, drill”, Palin replied with what she seemed to think was a zinger: “The chant is ‘drill, baby, drill,’ that’s what we hear all across the country at our rallies.”

Confronted with increasing oil prices as a result of the joint US and Israeli attack on Iran, the treasury department’s office of foreign assets control announced on Friday that it is temporarily lifting sanctions on Iranian oil sales, issuing a 30-day license: “Authorizing the Delivery and Sale of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products of Iranian-Origin Loaded on Vessels as of March 20, 2026”.

Donald Trump has arrived at his Florida beach club and has no more public events scheduled until Sunday, when he is slated to visit Memphis for a roundtable discussion of what the White House calls “the incredible achievements” of the federal task force he sent there to help police the city.

During his flight to Florida, Trump whiled away the time posting on his own social media platform claims that the US is “getting very close to meeting our objectives” and is considering “winding down” its war on Iran.

He also suggested other nations should be responsible for securing the safe passage of commercial ships that carry one-fifth of the world’s supply of oil and gas through the strait of Hormuz, the vital gateway to the Gulf that Iran has closed in response to the attack by the US and Israel.

“The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not!” Trump posted, in his idiosyncratic style, which seems to borrow from German by capitalizing nouns.

“If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated,” the president added, in an abdication of responsibility for the market chaos he has unleashed that it unlikely to reassure traders.

Just before he departed Air Force One, the president also took time to repeat his call for the state of Colorado to free a former Colorado county clerk, Tina Peters, who is serving a nine-year sentence for tampering with her county’s election equipment in search of the mythical election fraud Trump claimed existed in 2020.

Trump’s post on Peters was brief, but included at least four lies:

The Great State of Colorado, and a pathetic RINO District Attorney, together with the Radical Left Governor, gave a wonderful woman named Tina Peters, a 73-year-old Gold Star Mom, who has cancer, nine years in prison because, as a Republican Voting Official, she went after the Democrats for cheating in the 2020 Presidential Election. So, she went after them for cheating, and these SLEAZEBAGS put her in jail.

As the Colorado news anchor Kyle Clark explained on Wednesday, when Trump made the same false claims: “Peters is 70 (not 73), does not have cancer, was sentenced by a judge in Mesa County (not the Governor), and did not expose fraud in the 2020 presidential election.”

Trump’s characterization of Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, as “Radical Left” also ignores the fact that Polis said this month that he would consider granting Peters clemency.

As Americans die in a war launched, according to a senior intelligence official who resigned this week, on false pretenses, the president remains focused on what he sees as a vital issue: making fun of his predecessor.

That’s the inescapable message of an official White House video documenting the prime minister of Japan’s visit on Thursday, which shows that she laughed at a trolling portrait of Joe Biden as an autopen during a guided tour of Donald Trump’s ‘Presidential Walk of Fame’.

There is no sign in the highlight reel of the visit that a vital issue of global security was discussed by the two leaders: namely Trump’s demand that Japan should ignore its US-drafted constitution and send naval vessels to an active war zone to help force open the strait of Hormuz that Iran closed in response to being attacked by the US and Israel.

Instead, the video features the Japanese leader, Sanae Takaichi, praising Trump and laughing at the mockery of Biden Trump had installed on the exterior wall of the White House.

A senior federal judge has blocked the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that bars reporters who refused to sign a pledge to only publish authorized information from the US military’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

The ruling, that the new Pentagon credentialing policy violates the journalists’ constitutional First Amendment rights, came from a US district judge, Paul L Friedman, who was appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, but previously served as an assistant US attorney during the Nixon administration, and as an associate independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation during the presidency of George H W Bush.

Friedman’s 40-page ruling on Friday came in response to a New York Times lawsuit against the Pentagon and defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

The current Pentagon press corps is comprised manly of correspondents for far-right outlets that agreed to the policy.

The senior judge made his position clear in the first paragraph of the opinion, which read:

A primary purpose of the First Amendment is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription. Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.

Friedman, who just turned 82, said during oral argument in the case: “We’ve been through, in my lifetime… the Vietnam War, where the public, I think it’s fair to say, was lied to about a lot of things. We’ve been through 9/11. We’ve been through the Kuwait situation, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay. A lot of things need to be held tightly and secure… but openness and transparency allows members of the public to know what their government is doing in times of peace and more important, in times of war”.

That, he added, is “what the First Amendment is all about”.

“I think the public has a right to know a lot of things as [elections] approach and think about what their elected leaders in the legislative branch and the executive branch are doing,” the judge said.

At the end of his opinion, Friedman noted that there have to be limits of sharing classified information during war time, but the ongoing war in Iran makes it even more vital that the public has information about what the military is doing. The judge wrote:

The Court recognizes that national security must be protected, the security of our troops must be protected, and war plans must be protected. But especially in light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing—so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election.

US Southern Command announced on Friday that US forces carried out another “ lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Friday.

After the strike, the military said that there were three survivors and it “immediately notified U.S. Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivors”.

The coast guard said in a statement that made no mention of the attack that one of its ships had recovered two dead bodies and one survivor, and transferred them to the Costa Rican coast guard.

The strikes on suspected drug traffickers, by a military command headquartered across the street from Donald Trump’s Doral, Florida golf course, have been described as illegal by experts in international law, but the Pentagon appears to have changed strategy since the first attack in September when it ordered a follow-on strike to kill survivors.

Killing survivors has been considered a textbook example of a war crime since 1945, when the victorious allies in the second world war prosecuted a Nazi U-boat crew for killing shipwreck survivors.

As his war on Iran sends the stock market plunging and gasoline prices rising, Donald Trump paused en route to his Florida beach club to shout familiar taking points about how very well things are going, a reporters strained to hear him over the din of construction on the White House ballroom on Friday afternoon.

Speaking about the war, the president again implied, falsely, that Iran was on the verge of creating a nuclear weapons, which his director of national intelligence contradicted this week in testimony to Congress.

“We’re not giving a nuclear weapon to terrorist thugs,” Trump said, nonetheless.

He also cast doubt on the prospect of a quick end to the war, saying: “We can have dialogue, but I don’t want to do a ceasefire… You don’t do a ceasefire when you’re literally obliterating the other side.”

Asked if he was concerned about rising fuel costs for Americans, after Iran responded to the the joint US and Israeli attack by closing the strait of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, Trump said: “No, I expected worse. I really thought oil prices would go much higher when I did this.”

“We just set every record, every record in the book, with Dow, with the S&P,” the president continued, apparently suggesting that the US stock market was in such good shape before the attack that the sharp drops this week, with the Dow hovering around 45,500 on Friday was not a concern. “Dow at 50,000, S&P at 8,000, 7,000, at levels, at speed that nobody’s ever seen before,” the president said, with a note of instant nostalgia for the levels the stock market hit just before his attack on Iran.

Just one month ago, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, sought to deflect questions about the Epstein files by repeatedly telling lawmakers: “The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That’s what we should be talking about.”

“But I said I have to go off that path and I have to take a little journey,” Trump said Friday. “But we had to go off on a circuitous path and take care of business, and we are in the process of doing it and I’ll tell you I think we’re weeks ahead of schedule.”

The president then went on to advocate for the voter suppression legislation, the Save America act, Republican are struggling to pass in the Senate.

“I hear it’s going- look, it should be an easy pass, but we need Democrat votes,” Trump also said, referring to the 60-vote threshold to push the legislation to make it harder for US citizens to register to vote, and restrict vote-by-mail, through the Senate.

“They don’t want to approve voter ID because they cheat,” Trump aid of Democrats who are concerned that the measure, supposedly aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting, a problem that appears not to exist, would make it much harder for citizens to cast ballots. “They want to cheat, Peter!” the president shouted at his favorite Fox News correspondent, Peter Doocy.

Despite Trump’s effort to blame Democrats for refusing to pass the legislation, Senate Republicans have voiced their opposition to killing the filibuster to force the legislation through.

On Thursday, Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, announced that he would not support removing the 60-vote threshold, and criticized the crackdown on vote-by-mail, which is used by several Republican-run states, including Utah, Florida, Alaska, and Montana.

“Now, speaking of something that’s more pleasant,” Trump added as he changed the subject without skipping a beat, “you hear that? It’s going to be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world, nothing like it.”

Given the loud helicopter noise it was hard to say if anyone could hear the construction noise Trump seemed to be talking about. “They just started today one of the biggest pours of concrete that’s ever been seen in Washington.”

“I love the sound of concrete,” the president added.

• Donald Trump spent the morning putting pressure on Congress to pass his bills by posting on his Truth Social platform, emphasizing that there is “nothing more important” for the US at the moment than voter ID.

• The Trump administration is considering occupying or blockading Iran’s Kharg Island to pressure Iran into reopening the strait of Hormuz, according to a report in Axios. The report cited four sources who all spoke under the condition of anonymity.

• The US state department established a new bureau to oversee responses to natural disasters and humanitarian crises around the world, capping the Trump administration’s dramatic overhaul of foreign aid, a senior department official told the Associated Press.

• Trump’s presidential transition team repeatedly intervened in UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, Politico reported. The president’s aides reportedly told Starmer’s national security adviser and former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney that they wished for Mandelson’s predecessor Karen Pierce to remain in the post.

• The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said that it is investigating 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion services. While HHS did not list the states, the Associated Press reported that the 13 states with the coverage requirements are California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.

• The White House released a broad framework for Congress to “pre-empt state AI laws” that would slow down development, after significant lobbying from Silicon Valley to curtail liability and instate an industry-friendly national standard for the regulation of the fast-moving technology.

• Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a far-right political figure who stepped down from his position on Tuesday in protest of the war in Iran, spoke about his resignation and the ongoing investigation into him over an alleged leak of classified information, saying he has a “mission” to stop the Iran war.

Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, signed a legislative package on Friday to suspend the state’s fuel taxes for 60 days, making Georgia the first state to take direct action against the soaring pump prices triggered by the ongoing war with Iran.

The measure provides immediate relief by temporarily waiving the state’s 33-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax and 37-cent-per-gallon diesel tax. The move was part of a duo of financial relief bills fast-tracked through the state legislature this week to offset rising costs currently affecting Georgia households and businesses.

“Today is just the latest step we’re taking and it’s one that will help all Georgians as they work to make ends meet,” Kemp said at the state capitol before signing the bill into law.

Clergy will be allowed to minister to immigrants in a holding facility at the headquarters of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota after US district judge Jerry Blackwell granted an injunction requested on Friday by Minnesota branches of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ and a Catholic priest who had sued the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Associated Press.

Under his ruling, clergy will be allowed in-person pastoral visits to all detainees at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building south of Minneapolis, the site of frequent protests over the roughly 3,000 federal officers who were brought into the state during the crackdown.

The government says the enforcement surge officially ended in February and restrictions have eased since. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) called the building a short-term holding facility, and not the kind of long-term detention center where clergy visits are normally allowed.

A Nevada judge on Friday temporarily blocked prediction market operator Kalshi from offering events contracts that would allow the state’s residents to place financial bets on its platform related to sports entertainment, and elections.

The Carson City district court judge Jason Woodbury issued a temporary restraining order at the behest of the Nevada gaming control board that will prevent Kalshi from continuing to operate in the state without a license.

Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counter-terrorism Center and a far-right political figure who stepped down from his position on Tuesday in protest of the war in Iran, spoke about his resignation and the ongoing investigation into him over an alleged leak of classified information.

In an interview on Friday with journalist Megyn Kelly, Kent said he feels “very confident in what I’m doing right now. I think I have a mission. I think it is to do everything I can to stop this war.”

Regarding the investigation into him, he said he is “not concerned because I know I did nothing wrong. Of course, I am concerned because we’ve all seen the FBI and the full weight of the government come down on individuals,” adding: “That has me a little bit concerned, but I know the truth, and the facts are on my side.”

Kent went on to say that the investigation “does anger” him, but “it’s all just to be expected. I knew this was going to happen. I know their playbook. I think we’re all very familiar with their playbook.”

The Chicago transit agency on Friday sued the Trump administration after the White House in October froze $3.1bn in funding for major Chicago subway projects, saying it was an act of political retaliation, Reuters reported.

The suit, filed in the US district court in Chicago, said the federal government is attempting “to hold hostage billions of dollars in federal grants for crucial infrastructure projects in the City of Chicago”.

The suit says the frozen grants, which were approved during the administration of former president Joe Biden, are crucial to modernize and expand the “L”, Chicago’s system of elevated and underground trains.

Donald Trump has reinstated his endorsement of Jeff Hurd, a Republican House representative of Colorado, nearly a month after the president rescinded his support in response to Hurd’s vote to repeal the administration’s tariffs on Canada.

To resolve the primary conflict in Colorado’s third congressional district, Trump revealed that Hurd’s GOP challenger, Hope Scheppelman, has agreed to suspend her campaign. In exchange, both Scheppelman and her husband have been offered positions within the Trump administration.

“Together with them, we decided that Congressman Jeff Hurd, of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, should in no way, shape, or form, be impeded from winning the District in that the Democrat alternative is a DISASTER for our Country,” Trump wrote. “Therefore, I will be fully supporting Jeff’s Re-Election to the House of Representatives, giving him my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

Absences among Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security officers fell slightly on Thursday to 9.8% nationwide, but were much higher at some major airports, the government said on Friday.

The absenteeism rate among the 50,000 TSA officers fell from 10.2% on Wednesday but was significantly higher at major airports on Thursday, including 29% at New York’s JFK, 27% at New Orleans, Baltimore Washington at 23%, 32% at Atlanta and over 30% at both Houston airports, the Department of Homeland Security said.

The justice department filed a new lawsuit on Friday against Harvard University, saying its leadership failed to address antisemitism on campus, creating grounds for the government to freeze existing grants and seek repayment for grants already paid.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, is another missive in a protracted battle between the Trump administration and the elite university.

“The United States cannot and will not tolerate these failures,” the justice department wrote in the lawsuit. It asked the court to compel Harvard to comply with federal civil rights law and to help it “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution”.

The lawsuit also asks a judge to require that Harvard call police to arrest protesters blocking parts of campus and to appoint an “independent outside monitor”, approved by the government, to ensure it complies with court orders.