Trump puts pressure on Senate majority leader in blunt message: pass strict voter ID bill – live

Donald Trump reprised his new favorite role as cheerleader for the US-Israeli war on Iran, telling reporters in Washington on Wednesday night that “we have very good news on the war front,” despite increasing chaos in the Persian Gulf, where Iraq’s oil ports halted operations after ships were reportedly set on fire by Iranian attacks.

The good news Trump shared with reporters after disembarking from Air Force One was, he said, “they are absolutely being destroyed. Iran is absolutely decimated.”

The president, speaking briefly on the tarmac, was not challenged on his claim by the select group of political reporters allowed to ask him questions, none of whom mentioned developments in the Persian Gulf, where Iran declared the vital strait of Hormuz, a conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil, under its control.

Asked if he would consider having the US Treasury Department buy oil futures to bring the oil prices down, Trump dodged the question and claimed that Iran’s armed force “are pretty much at the end of the line. Doesn’t mean we’re going to end it immediately, but they are. They’ve got no navy, they’ve got no air force, they’ve got no anti-air traffic, anything. They have no systems of control. We’re just riding free range over that country.”

Either unaware of or discounting the Iranian attacks that effectively closed the strait of Hormuz to oil tankers on Wednesday, Trump then said: “And now we’re going to look very strongly at the straits. The straits are in great shape.”

“We’ve knocked out all of their boats,” the president continued, despite reports that Iraqi oil tankers were set alight by Iranian boats packed with explosives hours before he spoke.

“They have some missiles, but not very many,” Trump said. “We’re in very good shape.”

He then seemed to retract his earlier claim that the United States had already won the war with Iran. “The main thing is we have to win this thing,” the president said. “Win it quickly, but win it.”

He then sourced his claim that the war had already been won to “many people” he’d seen on the partisan, rightwing news channels he watches. “Just watching some of the news, most people say it’s already been won,” the president said, revealing where he turns for up-to-date information on the war he started in another region of the planet.

Joe Rogan, the podcaster who hosted and then endorsed Donald Trump before the 2024 election, said this week that the US military attacks on Venezuela and Iran this year were a betrayal of voters who were won over by his claim to be against regime change wars.

In a new episode of his show, which remains at the top of the podcast charts in the US and Australia, and is second in the UK, Rogan said that even though he gets occasional texts from the president, he was surprised by “this whole fucking Iran thing”.

Speaking to a guest, Rogan said: “Neither thing made any sense to me.”

“The Venezuela thing, I mean, look, they wanted him out forever, and he definitely stole the election to get in there in the first place, and he was a dictator, but at least that one was at least clean. They go in, kidnap him, get him out,” Rogan said. “This one’s nuts,” he added, in reference to the war on Iran Trump launched 12 days ago from his Florida beach club.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me, unless we’re acting on someone else’s interest, like particularly Israel’s interests. It just didn’t make any sense to me,” Rogan added. “Like if they had supposedly dismantled their chances of making a nuclear bomb, whether or not that’s true or- I mean, it’s so hard to know.”

“It just seems so insane based on what he ran on,” the podcaster said of the president he endorsed. “I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on ‘no more wars’ end these stupid, senseless wars. And then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

Rogan also revealed that he is relying on Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to let him know “what’s real and what’s not, because there’s a lot of fake video going around” of the conflict in the Middle East. “And you have to listen to Grok,” Rogan said, “Grok’s dismantling a lot of the fake videos.”

However, as the British Iranian verification expert Shayan Sardarizadeh reported this week, Grok has been mistakenly telling users video clips of real attacks on Iran are fake, and fake videos are real.

Faced with spiking oil prices, as navigation through the Persian Gulf has ground to a halt since the US-Israeli attack on Iran, and oil tankers now in flames following reported Iranian attacks, the Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it is releasing 172m barrels from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve, beginning next week.

The release “will take approximately 120 days to deliver based on planned discharge rates”, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said in a statement.

“Earlier today,” Wright also said, “32 member nations of the International Energy Agency unanimously agreed to President Trump’s request to lower energy prices with a coordinated release of 400 million barrels of oil and refined products from their respective reserves.”

The US release from its reserve is part of that effort, Wright added.

Since Donald Trump was late for his speech in Hebron, Kentucky, on Wednesday, the crowd, and waiting reporters, got to hear a few extra songs from the playlist put together to entertain his supporters before the president’s remarks.

The lyrics from one of those songs stood out, since one of the main reasons Trump held this rally in Kentucky was to endorse a challenger hoping to defeat Thomas Massie.

Massie is a Republican representative from Kentucky who defied Trump by forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the justice department to release files from the federal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender Trump socialized with for nearly two decades.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump notoriously told a New York magazine reporter in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Given that, it seemed odd to hear the crowd waiting for Trump to appear in Kentucky treated to the viral country song, Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony, a young singer from Kentucky’s neighbor Virginia. (Anthony’s confused class politics were criticized by Billy Bragg in a 2023 Guardian opinion piece, and in an answer song.)

At one point in the song, in lines that were played for the Trump supporters awaiting the president’s arrival,Anthony sings: “I wish politicians would look out for miners/ And not just minors on an island somewhere”, which is a clear reference to Epstein’s private island, where some of his young victims were abused.

As video circulating online appears to show oil tankers filled with Iraqi oil in flames in the Persian Gulf after reported attacks by Iran, Donald Trump assured his supporters at a rally in Hebron, Kentucky, that the war on Iran he started from his Florida beach club 12 days ago is already over and “we won”.

After Trump first shouted “Operation Epic Fury!”, the Pentagon’s name for the US offensive, and received cheers from his supporters, he added: “Is that a great name? Well, it’s only good if you win … and we’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won.”

“You know, you never like to say too early you won,” Trump continued, perhaps thinking of his predecessor, George W Bush, standing in front of a huge “Mission Accomplished” banner in 2003 and prematurely declaring a US victory in Iraq.

But then he plowed ahead with his own declaration. “We won. We won. In the first hour it was over,” Trump said, as Iraqi security officials told Reuters two foreign tankers carrying Iraqi fuel oil were in flames after being hit by explosive-laden Iranian boats.

The question of why, exactly, Donald Trump visited Kentucky on Wednesday was answered a few minutes ago when he briefly turned his speech into a campaign rally for Ed Gallrein, a former Navy Seal who is running to unseat Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman who crossed Trump by leading the effort to release files from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for nearly two decades.

Trump first focused his remarks on how very much he hates Massie.

“I just want to say this: Thomas Massie is a disaster for our party,” Trump said of the man who co-wrote the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bill the president was forced to sign into law, after a concerted effort to keep it from coming up for a vote failed.

“Massie’s a complete and total disaster as a congressman, and frankly as a human being,” the president added of the man who made it much more difficult for him to avoid questions about his own close relationship with a convicted sex criminal.

He then offered a less than ringing endorsement of how hard he looked for someone to challenge Massie in the Republican primary. “I wanted just – give me somebody with a warm body to beat Massie,” Trump said. “And I got somebody with a warm body.”

When Trump then called Gallrein on stage, the candidate performed the kind of loyalty to the president that he expects.

“Tom Massie stands with the ladies of The View,” Gallrein told Trump and the crowd. “Mr President, we stand with you!”

“We’ve got to get rid of this loser,” Trump then said, reiterating his attack on Massie. “This guy is bad. He’s disloyal to the Republican party, he’s disloyal to the people of Kentucky and, most importantly, he is disloyal to the United States of America.”

At one point in his lengthy attack on Massie, Trump paused to attempt to explain away the fact that Massie was more academically successful than he was, since the congressman has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while the president attended Fordham University for two years and was then admitted to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with help from a friend of his father who worked in the admissions office.

“He went to a good college,” Trump said of Massie. “But I know a lot of stupid people that went to a good college. And my uncle was the longest-serving professor in the history of that particular college, university, MIT … My uncle was there 41 years, that means I have much better blood, if you go by that,” Trump added, referring to his often stated eugenicist belief that his uncle’s intelligence means that he is intelligent.

“But I went to the hardest college of all to get into, the Wharton school of finance, that means I’m real smart,” Trump said, pointing at his head.

The president’s claim about the difficulty of getting into the school he eventually graduated from is completely false.

In fact, more than half of the students who applied to the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 were accepted, and transfer students, like Donald Trump, had an even higher acceptance rate at the time, the admissions officer who knew his father told the Washington Post in 2019.

While the university has recently become extremely selective, admitting just 7% of applicants in recent years, as late as 1980, more than 40% of students who applied were admitted.

Near the start of his remarks, Donald Trump said the midterms “are going to be very, very important”. He highlighted how his administration has introduced laws ending tax on overtime work, which drew particularly loud appreciation from his hundreds of supporters.

Security at the Trump event in Kentucky says it turned away hundreds of the president’s supporters due to a lack of space, despite the inclement weather that has persisted today.

Donald Trump’s speech in Kentucky was paused briefly as a woman in the bleachers behind reportedly fainted.

As the woman was helped away, Trump pointed out to the crowd that one of the people who responded was the former TV star he made administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Mehmet Oz.

“It’s Dr Oz!” the president shouted with enthusiasm as he pointed to the medical emergency unfolding behind him.

Donald Trump seemed to veer from his prepared remarks on the US economy in Kentucky on Wednesday to again describe the US war on Iran as “an excursion”.

After he read a prediction that US employment numbers would improve “by the end of the year”, the president seemed to remember that the war he launched with Israel against Iran has sent energy prices skyrocketing and raised fears of a global recession. Looking away from his Teleprompter, the president paused to justify the war and downplay its scale.

“We did an excursion, you know what an excursion is?” Trump asked, as he made a wavy hand gesture, as if tracing the path of a winding river.

“We had to take a little trip to get rid of some evil, very evil people,” the president continued.

After pausing for the crowd to chant “USA!”, Trump then argued that the Iranians had been “killing our people” for 47 years and reiterated his baseless claim that “they were going to try to take over the whole Middle East, they were gonna knock out Israel”.

The president then shouted: “They don’t know what the hell hit them!”

“They got hit by the American military” the president boasted, just hours after he denied knowing anything about a Pentagon investigation that reportedly concluded that the US military fired a missile at a girls’ elementary school on the first day of the war, killing about 175 people, many of them girls between 7 and 12 years old.

Having boasted about the war that has killed civilians and spiked energy prices, Trump then returned to his prepared remarks, saying: “To bring down energy costs for American workers and families and businesses like this one we ended the green new scam,” in reference to stopping US subsidies for renewable energy, which would make the country’s economy less reliant on oil.

Donald Trump has just taken the stage for a speech at Verst Logistics in Hebron, Kentucky. He opened his remarks by boasting about his electoral success in the deep red Republican state and moved on to attack Kamala Harris “and Sleepy Joe”.

It is not entirely clear why the president is making the visit or the speech, but the Cincinnati Enquirer reports that invitations for the event were sent to supporters by the Senate campaign of Andy Barr, a Kentucky congressman who has made his closeness to Trump the central message of his effort to win the Republican nomination in a competitive primary to succeed the retiring Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell.

Barr’s main opponents are the state’s former attorney general, Daniel Cameron, who is a protege of McConnell, and Nate Morris, a founder of a waste management company whose campaign was boosted by support from Elon Musk, who donated $10m to a political action committee supporting him. Morris is also a friend of Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, so a Trump endorsement of Barr could set up an electoral battle between proxies of the president and the vice-president.

Barr has recently been accused of racism for running a campaign ad in his primary campaign against Cameron, who is Black, in which he calls diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, “dumb, evil indoctrination”. The same Barr ad includes a photograph of a Black protester in a Martin Luther King T-shirt.

Update: When Trump did later mention prominent Republicans at the event, he named Barr, Cameron and Morris, without endorsing any of them.

• A preliminary investigation into the bombing of an Iranian girls’ elementary school found that the US is to blame for the strike that killed at least 175 people, according to the New York Times. Citing unnamed officials familiar with the preliminary findings, the Times reports that Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school was the result of a “targeting mistake” by the US military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian base, that used to include the school building.

• Donald Trump issued a blunt message to the Senate majority leader, John Thune, as the top Republican battles faces the reality of not having the requisite votes to pass the Save America Act – now the president’s legislative priority. “He’s got to be a leader,” the president told reporters outside the White House today. Thune has said the votes “aren’t there” for a talking filibuster, or doing away with the legislative filibuster altogether in order to advance the bill. Today, Trump said it was up to the South Dakota lawmaker to “get them” regardless.

• Trump also said that the US-Israel war in Iran will end “soon” because there is “practically nothing left to target” in a phone interview with Axios. It’s the latest update in a series of inconsistent messages from the administration on the estimated timeline of the war. “Any time I want it to end, it will end,” the president told the outlet.

• In a video update, Adm Brad Cooper – the commander of US Central Command (Centcom) – said that the US has “hit more than 5,500 targets inside Iran, including more than 60 ships” since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury 11 days ago. Later, Trump also noted that the US has hit “28 mine ships as of this moment” – up from the 16 that Centcom said it “eliminated” near the strait of Hormuz on Tuesday.

• The latest consumer price index report showed that US inflation remained at an annual rate of 2.4% in February. The data does not reflect the hike in average gasoline prices since the beginning of the US-Israel war on Iran. Overall, prices rose 0.3% from January.

A Florida man was charged with making threats against Donald Trump, Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell and an unnamed individual who appeared to be the Fed chair, Jerome Powell.

A federal grand jury in the northern district of Florida returned a four-count indictment against Diego Villavicencio, who is accused of making violent threats against a member of Congress and the president of the United States.

According to the indictment, which details messages sent between September 2025 and January 2026, Villavicencio threatened an unnamed member of Congress, confirmed by NBC News to be representative Eric Swalwell, writing: “I’ll kill you and your family and you won’t do anything about it.” It also states that he threatened the life of the president of the United States, writing in a January message: “I’ll be driving there to take a couple of shots at trump and some other corrupt plutocrats.”

Villavicencio’s alleged actions violate several federal statutes, including making threats against the president, threatening a federal official and transmitting true threats in interstate commerce.

A trial is set for May in Tallahassee, Florida.

During a congressional hearing with the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, last month, Swalwell, a high-profile anti-Trump critic who is running for governor of California, recounted several death threats he and his family had received in recent months. He said in two instances, the justice department had declined to bring charges and asked Bondi for her help ensuring threats against himself and other public officials were prosecuted.

“We never expected that the Department of Justice would not seek to prosecute and investigate those who are making threats against us,” Swalwell told Bondi. “I’m just asking for your help to protect life – because life is at risk with the environment we’re in now.”

In response, Bondi said she was personally aware of some of the threats against Swalwell and said some of the cases against the congressman were “very active”.

“None of you should be threatened, ever,” she added. “None of your children should be threatened, none of your families should be threatened. You can come into my office any day – I will work with all of you on both sides of the aisle if you are ever threatened.”

John Cornyn, the Texas Republican fighting to hold his US Senate, backtracked on his previous support for the legislative filibuster in order to pledge his support for Donald Trump’s “number one priority” – the Save America Act – and hopefully secure the president’s endorsement in the process.

In an op-ed published in the New York Post on Wednesday, Cornyn said that Democrats are “weaponizing the Senate’s rules” to block the voter ID legislation from advancing.

“After careful consideration, I support whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary for us to get the SAVE America Act and homeland security funding past the Democrats’ obstruction, through the Senate, and on the president’s desk for his signature,” Cornyn wrote.

The incumbent is set to face the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, in a May runoff after neither candidate secured 50% of the vote in the Texas primary earlier this month.

Trump held off backing either Texas GOP candidate, but recently said that he would announce an endorsement soon. He’s also homed in on the Save America Act as his most important legislative concern – refusing to sign any other bills until it is passed in Congress.

Reporting from Hebron, Kentucky

Amid thunderstorms and a tornado warning, hundreds of people have lined up outside a packaging plant in northern Kentucky this afternoon to see the president.

One was Chuck Wills, a 76-year-old Vietnam veteran who waited in line for three hours this morning to secure a front-row seat to see Donald Trump.

“It was worth it,” he says.

For Wills, who lives locally, it’s his first time seeing Trump in person, although he’s not unaware of the challenges facing the country. He says the economy will take some time improve.

“There’s going to be a little pain before it turns around,” he says.

On Iran’s new leaders, Donald Trump added: “We knocked out twice their leadership, and now they have a new group coming up. Let’s see what happens to them.”

A reminder that Trump has consistently expressed strong disapproval of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the assassinated ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In recent days, Trump has said his appointment was a “big mistake” and suggested he wouldn’t “last long” without US approval.

Speaking to reporters at a pharmaceutical company in Cincinnati, Ohio, Donald Trump continued to refer to the US-Israel war on Iran as an “excursion”.

When asked why he keeps using “war” and “excursion” interchangeably, the president said: “It’s both.”

It’s both an excursion that will keep us out of a war. For them it’s a war. For us, it turned out to be easier than we thought.

Trump went on to say that the US has hit “28 mine ships as of this moment”. This is up from the 16 that US Central Command said it “eliminated” near the strait of Hormuz on Tuesday.

The president also tried to assuage concerns about the whipsawing price of oil. “I would say it went up a little bit less than we thought. It’s going to come down more than anybody understands,” he told reporters in Ohio.

The FBI warned California police departments that Iran could retaliate against US attacks by launching drones at the west coast, according to ABC News, citing a reviewed alert that was distributed at the end of February.

“Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” the alert read, according to ABC. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”

Neither the FBI field office in Los Angeles nor the White House immediately responded to ABC’s request for comment.

The US state department said on Wednesday that Iran and Iran-aligned militas may be planning to target US-owned oil and energy infrastructure and hotels in Iraq.

In a post on X, the US embassy in Baghdad said: “Iran-aligned terrorist militias have also targeted hotels frequented by Americans throughout Iraq, including the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR).”

It urged US citizens in Iraq to “remain vigilant, maintain a low profile and stay away from areas that could make them a target”.