Trump issues blunt message to Senate majority leader to pass voter ID legislation
As John Thune battles conservative blowback for refusing to alter Senate rules and mandate a traditional “talking” filibuster that would force Democrats to hold the floor to block the Save America Act, Donald Trump had a blunt message for the Senate majority leader. “He’s got to be a leader,” the president told reporters outside the White House today.
The upper chamber’s top Republican has said he’ll likely hold a vote on the legislation, which requires proof of citizenship while registering to vote and significantly curbs mail-in voting, next week. However, staunch Democratic opposition means it will fall short of the 60-vote threshold needed to advance.
Thune has said the votes “aren’t there” for a talking filibuster, or doing away with the legislative filibuster altogether – the so-called “nuclear” option. Today, Trump said it was up to the South Dakota lawmaker to “get them” regardless.
Key events
Stephen Starr
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 say they turned away hundreds of the president’s supporters due to a lack of space, despite the inclement weather that’s persisted today.
Trump speech interrupted as supporter behind him reportedly faints
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.
Trump says US military ‘excursion’ was necessary because Iran was trying to take over the whole Middle East
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.
Why is Trump speaking in Kentucky?
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.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Lauren Gambino
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.”
Cornyn doubles down on Save Act while backtracking on support for filibuster in new op-ed
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.
Stephen Starr
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.
Lucy Campbell
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.
Lucy Campbell
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”.
