Closing summary
We are closing our live coverage of the Trump restoration for the day, but will return on Wednesday to continue. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, told Laura Ingraham on Fox that he accepts “full responsibility” for adding creating a Signal group to discuss confidential war plans, but is still unclear about how he added the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg by mistake.
Donald Trump kept downplaying national security concerns on Tuesday after top White House officials added a journalist to a Signal chat discussing plans to conduct military strikes in Yemen.
The Senate voted to confirm Marty Makary as the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health. Both men were skeptics of the Covid-19 response.
In a letter to Trump on Tuesday, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic minority in the House, demanded that the president fire his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, for disclosing secret war plans for strikes on Yemen to a Signal group that included a journalist.
Ignoring the uproar in Greenland over the plan for his wife, Usha Vance, to visit the territory this week without an invitation, the US vice-president, JD Vance, announced in a video message that he plans to join her. The White House did, however, scrap plans for the second lady to attend a public event.
Democratic senators grilled Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence and CIA director John Ratcliffe about the chat that discussed war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Gabbard claimed that “there was no classified material” in the Signal chat.
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Critics of Covid-19 pandemic response confirmed to lead FDA and NIH
The Senate voted on Tuesday to confirm Marty Makary as the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health.
Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, and Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist, were both celebrated skeptics of the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Makary, who questioned mask mandates in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, and frequently appeared on Fox to criticize the Biden administration’s promotion of vaccines, also told Congress the federal government was the “greatest perpetrator of misinformation” about Covid-19.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting most people contract Covid-19 infections in pursuit of herd immunity.
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity” Bhattacharya and his co-authors wrote, “is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
This approach, which then president Donald Trump supported in the closing months of the 2020 presidential election campaign, while frequently calling it “herd mentality”, was based on the false hope that the virus would not mutate into new variants and people would only get infected once with the illness.
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