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Supreme Court gives Trump go-ahead on ballroom
The Supreme Court issued a decision on Monday that gives Donald Trump the ability to proceed with his plans for construction of a new White House ballroom.
Trump’s plans for a White House ballroom have been an ongoing point of contention and legal action, with opponents arguing that Trump has no legal authority to pursue the project without congressional approval. In a 5-4 decision, the court granted the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court ruling that would have prevented work from being done on the ballroom.
The Supreme Court also issued a temporary order earlier this month which allowed work to continue on the ballroom, resulting in Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer accusing the court of “rubber stamping Trump’s vanity-driven, gilded corruption”.
Key events
Trump says that latest strikes on Iran are part of a ‘limited’ military campaign
In the Oval Office today, Donald Trump said the latest strikes on Iran, as the two countries exchange fire for the first time in a month, are part of a “limited” campaign.
“They’re a failed nation,” the president said after threatening to hit “Iran” hard after the regime struck Jordanian airbases over the weekend.
“Their leaders are largely dead. Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone,” Trump told reporters today. “That doesn’t mean we won’t smack them. We’ll see what happens.”
The president also claimed that traffic is increasing through the vital strait of Hormuz chokepoint, even though the average number is substantially lower – and has remained so – since the war began. There was, however, an uptick in the number of transits in the past two weeks, before the most recent strikes.
Chris Hippensteel
Vance – who has now finished speaking in Michigan – also fired back at El-Sayed for comments the Democratic nominee made about Vance’s wife on social media.
“Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,” Vance told the crowd.
El-Sayed had previously insinuated in a post that Vance would not have introduced his wife, Usha, to his late grandfather, a remark that was widely interpreted as jab at Usha Vance’s Indian-American heritage.
Donald Trump is now speaking in the Oval Office about price cuts for prescription drugs. We’ll bring you the latest lines.
Chris Hippensteel
JD Vance has turned his address in Michigan toward Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Mike Rogers’ Democratic opponent in Michigan’s Senate race.
The vice-president is taking aim at El-Sayed’s association with leftwing political commentator Hasan Piker, and for comments El-Sayed made after an attack on the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in March. El-Sayed has apologized for those comments, saying they were meant to add context. At the time the nominee condemned the violence but added that “hurt people hurt people” and that “violence is a cycle”.
“I made a mistake,” El-Sayed said over the weekend at an event in Lansing, and apologized for his comments. “If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry,” he added.
“There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil,” Vance said today, describing El-Sayed as divisive and as willing to pit racial and religious groups against one another.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Trump vowed further strikes on Iran after a series of ballistic missile attacks on US airbases in Jordan. “We’re going to hit them hard,” Trump told a Fox News correspondent, adding: “There will be a response.” Iran fired ballistic missiles at the US-operated King Hussein and al-Azraq airbases in Jordan after the US launched its own strike on Iran’s Larak Island on Sunday night, the first US strikes on the country in more than a month. Larak Island is located near the mouth of the strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway and oil shipping chokepoint which has been at the center of the conflict.
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Treasury secretary Scott Bessent delivered opening remarks at a G20 meeting while touting the Trump administration’s new Iran sanctions. Bessent – who used his opening remarks at the conference of world financial leaders to praise President Trump – faces the challenge of winning the support of allies and adversaries for a plan to further isolate Iran’s already war-battered economy. He started off by thanking the EU for backing that plan. Speaking to the media before and after those opening remarks, Bessent expressed optimism that the sanctions could force Iran’s leaders to make a deal. He also spoke dismissively of Canada’s efforts to retaliate against the US in the two nations’ escalating trade showdown.
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Trump decried datacenter opposition on Truth Social on Monday. As a movement opposing the breakneck buildout of datacenters across the country gains steam, Trump took to his personal social media platform to scold those who want to see construction of the facilities slowed or put to a halt. The only reason communities would speak out against datacenters is “if they want to end up being backwards and poor”, Trump wrote. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” he added.
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The House of Representatives returned from a recess on Monday, with Republicans eager to avoid a shutdown. After a five-week hiatus, House Republicans are seeking to push through a stopgap spending bill to stave off a government shutdown, after multiple full or partial federal shutdowns have snarled Congress since the start of the second Trump administration. Funding is currently secured through the end of September, and GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to hold a floor vote on the issue this week.
Chris Hippensteel
Vice-president JD Vance has taken the stage in Sterling Heights, Michigan, at a campaign event supporting Republican candidates up for election in the state in November.
He opened his remarks to the crowd by focusing on illegal immigration, and American workers – particularly American truck drivers – he describes as being displaced by undocumented immigrants.
“American jobs ought to go to American workers, not illegal foreigners,” Vance said.
Melody Schreiber
Providers are seeing more patients in need of abortions later in pregnancy as abortion bans and restrictions proliferate in US states, all while access to insurance falls.
Those bans and restrictions have also meant that later abortion care access has grown over the past decade in a handful of haven states and cities.
Patients are showing up “later and sicker” in need of reproductive healthcare, said Diane Horvath, a co-founder of Partners in Abortion Care in Maryland.
About 41 states have abortion bans or significant restrictions at some point in pregnancy. More than 20 million people have lost Medicaid coverage since 2023, while between 3 and 5 million people have lost or dropped their coverage through Affordable Care Act exchanges in recent months.
“People are getting chucked off of Medicaid. The premiums are all going up,” Horvath said. Instead of seeking care early in pregnancy, she said: “They’re just not going in. There’s no place to go.”
The cost of later abortion – which is loosely defined as anything past the first trimester, the time during which the vast majority of abortions occur – tends to rise the later it happens in a pregnancy.
“Sometimes you’re looking at a $22,000 gap with maybe three days to pull together funding,” said Alisha Dingus, executive director of the DC Abortion Fund (DCAF), one of the largest abortion funds in the country. Rising costs and decreasing availability “may create substantial barriers to accessing later abortion care”, a recent Jama study found.
Read the full report here:
As we reported earlier, the United States and Iran have exchanged fire for the first time in a month, with missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, and Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan and the UAE in response. Donald Trump has threatened further action.
Here’s my colleague Patrick Wintour’s report:
Vice-president JD Vance will shortly be speaking at a manufacturing facility in Sterling Heights, Michigan.
He is there campaigning on behalf of several Republican nominees in key statewide races, including Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in a closely watched race against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and congressman John James, who is running to replace Gretchen Whitmer in the governor’s race. James will face Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, in the November general election.
I’ll bring you all the key lines from Vance’s remarks when it gets going.
Pentagon plays down report of Hegseth regularly overruling military advice
Joseph Gedeon
Pete Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway, the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said, as he tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war against Iran.
“Of course, we demand candid military advice,” Sean Parnell wrote on X. “Non-concurs are standard. The Secretary sees them constantly. That’s how you run a real military.”
Parnell was responding to the Post’s account of four four-star commanders who had lodged formal “non-concurs” against a plan to keep more than 50,000 US troops in the Middle East through September, with some deployments potentially running into 2027.
In dismissing the story, Parnell did not dispute that the objections had been filed, or that Hegseth fields such dissent on an ongoing basis.
“Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime,” he wrote. “It’s a betrayal of the force. And much of what they’re publishing is inaccurate … We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS – they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.”
It was unclear which parts of the story the Pentagon deems to be inaccurate. A community note attached to the X post noted that, while leaking classified material is illegal for government employees, the US supreme court ruled in 1971 that the first amendment protects the press’s right to publish classified information of public interest.
Here’s Joseph’s full report:
Kalshi permanently bans George Santos after he bet on his State of the Union plans
Prediction market platform Kalshi has issued its first lifetime ban on none other than the disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos, who bet against his own announced plans to attend Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.
In a filing, Kalshi said of the affair: “The Compliance Department found that Santos made these statements with the intent to manipulate the price of the Yes or No contracts that he intended to purchase. Ultimately, these statements did in fact manipulate the price of said contracts.
“The Compliance Department has issued a penalty permanently suspending Santos from direct or indirect access to Kalshi and has imposed a penalty of $71,356.”
The company said he had made $17,839.57 from his wagers.
Santos responded in a post on X this morning: “Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform. Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.”
Santos was released from prison in New Jersey in October after Donald Trump commuted his seven-year, three-month sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
The former congressman was revealed to have fabricated much about his life during his congressional campaign and was expelled from Congress while under federal investigation for fraud in 2023.
Following his release, Santos returned to X in February to tell his millions of followers that he planned to attend Trump’s speech. “I’m gonna be in the gallery,” he wrote.
But he didn’t attend the event. “I guess people lost money,” he said on his podcast in March. “Some people made unexpected money. That’s to show you how fragile these markets are.”
He was also fined $35,000 and received a three-year trading ban from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission last month for alleged market manipulation over the incident.
Tom Ambrose
Vance also said that Trump was sending a message to Iran with his AI-generated social media video, posted over the weekend, that shows the US bombing Kharg Island.
“The president likes to switch it up on social media a little bit. He would be the first to say he doesn’t make announcements about military actions on social media, but I think that he’s sending a message to the Iranians,” Vance said when asked about Trump’s post.
A US official said on Monday the military had not targeted Kharg Island in overnight strikes. An Iranian official dismissed Trump’s post as “laughable”.
Speaking to reporters before he took off for Detroit, JD Vance defended the Donald Trump’s earlier comments about Americans who oppose datacenter construction, but attempted to underscore the need for tech companies to subsidize the higher energy costs that come with the AI expansion.
“I think probably 99% of the backlash to datacenters has come in areas where building a datacenter means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground,” Vance said. “If you build a datacenter – you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out. And if that is happening, I don’t think the datacenters are that controversial. It’s when the utility bills get so much higher that’s when it’s a real problem.”
