Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Join us again tomorrow for another installment. Here are the latest developments:
The US supreme court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in Callais v Louisiana, a high-stakes voting rights case in which the court’s conservative majority appears poised to gut one of the most powerful provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Donald Trump confirmed that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, enraging the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
JD Vance, the vice-president, sought to downplay racist, sexist tests from Republican operatives aged 24 to 35 by casting them, falsely as “young boys”. Vance told a podcast: “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”
Bill Ackman, a billionaire Trump supporter, donated $1m this week to Defend NYC, a Super Pac set up by a former Trump campaign adviser to oppose Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, state campaign finance records show.
A federal judge in Oregon on Wednesday extended two temporary restraining orders that block the Trump administration from federalizing and deploying national guard troops to Portland.
Pentagon reporters who declined to sign a new set of policies that press advocates and news organizations denounced as incompatible with the tenets of journalism were set to return their press badges by 5pm on Wednesday, ending decades of history of robust in-house coverage at the world’s largest military headquarters.
A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out layoffs during the ongoing government shutdown.
The US federal government remains shut down for day 15, with no end in sight.
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Trump shows off plans for triumphal arch at dinner for White House ballroom donors
Dozens of potential donors to Donald Trump’s new $250 million White House ballroom attended a dinner with the president on Wednesday.
Companies with business before the federal government sent representatives to the East Room event, The Wall Street Journal reported, including Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon and Palantir.
Trump regaled them with his claim that a White House ballroom had been desired by presidents for over a century and displayed a model for a triumphal arch he wants to build across from the Lincoln Memorial.
At the location for the proposed arch, Trump said: “In 1902, they were going to put a statue of Robert E. Lee up, would have been okay with me, a lot of people wouldn’t have liked it, would have been okay with me, would’ve been okay with a lot of the people in this room.”
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