Closing summary
This brings our coverage of the day in US politics to a close. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump fired Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary and nominated Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Oklahoma senator, to replace her.
Mullin is a die-hard supporter of the president, but Trump supporters might be angered to learn that he defended the Capitol Police officer who fatally shot Ashli Babbitt during the 2021 Capitol riot.
Mullin never served in the US armed forces, but routinely speaks as if he did.
The US House of Representatives on Thursday voted down a Democratic-backed measure to halt hostilities with Iran, as Republicans cleared the way for Donald Trump to continue the conflict that has drawn in countries across the Middle East, but criticized as having unclear goals.
One beneficiary of the chaos in the Persian Gulf appears to be Russia, since the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, just announced that the US has issued a temporary 30-day waiver “to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil.”
In a bizarre spectacle, Lionel Messi and his Inter Miami teammates were forced to stand behind Trump as he began a White House ceremony in their honor with nine minutes of boasting about his attacks on Iran and Venezuela and then hintd that Cuba is next. Trump also complimented Luis Suárez on his looks and brought up Cristiano Ronaldo and that late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner for no apparent reason.
Trump tells Time magazine his Iran war could bring retaliatory attacks in US
In a new Time magazine interview this week, conducted like so many other by phone, Donald Trump was asked if Americans should be worried about potential terrorist attacks in the US in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes on Iran. “I guess,” Trump replied. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
