Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day. We will be back on Wednesday. Here are some of the day’s major developments:
Donald Trump told reporters that he is baffled that his supporters are so interested in the “sordid, but boring” crimes of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who told a reporter two years before his death in a Manhattan jail cell that he had been “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years”. Trump supporters were baffled to hear that.
Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who has previously disobeyed Trump’s commands, announced that he is introducing “a discharge petition “to force a vote” in the House on releasing the full Epstein files.
House speaker Mike Johnson and other leading Republicans appeared to break with the president by supporting calls for testimony to Congress from Ghislaine Maxwell, who conspired with Epstein to sexually exploit underage girls.
The Trump administration decided to withdraw half of the 4,000 national guard troops it dispatched to Los Angeles chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed to the Guardian.
In a rambling set of remarks at an AI and energy investment summit, Trump veered wildly off-topic to praise two partisan, conservative reporters in attendance and made false claims about China having just one wind farm and about his uncle having once taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
Mike Waltz, who was ousted as national security adviser after mistakenly adding a journalist to a group chat on Signal about strikes on Yemen, had his confirmation hearing to become UN ambassador.
The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, asked Israel to “aggressively” investigate the murder of a Palestinian American citizen who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
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Vance breaks tie after senate spilts 50-50 on measure to claw back funding for foreign aid and public media
Vice-president JD Vance just voted to break a 50-50 tie in the senate on a measure to move ahead with clawing back $9.4bn funds already appropriated by congress for foreign aid projects and public television and radio broadcasts.
Vance’s vote was necessary because three Republicans, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell, broke with their party and joined all 47 Democratic senators against the bill.
Collins said in a statement that she objected to the fact that “no one really knows what program reductions”’ are in the package since the White House budget office “never provided the details that would normally be part of this process”. While she expressed regret that cuts to public broadcasting would deprive viewers of popular entertainment shows like Antiques Roadshow, she also said that she supported defunding National Public Radio due to what she called its “biased reporting”.
In a speech on the senate floor before the vote, Murkowski expressed more support for public broadcasting. “It you don’t like what’s going on within NPR and PBS, you think that there’s too much bias there, we can address that,” she said. “You don’t need to gut the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity, the program that provides for so much support, particularly for those in rural places”.
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