Donald Trump has continued his contradictory messaging over the Iran war, telling a rally in Kentucky that the war is “won” but “we don’t want to leave early, do we?”.
With Trump and his fellow Republicans under pressure, according to polls, due to a stuttering economy, immigration crackdowns and the Iran conflict, the president noted this year’s midterm elections “are going to be very, very important”.
His comments came as US energy secretary Chris Wright said the US will release 172m barrels of oil from its strategic petroleum reserve in a bid to reduce oil prices that have soared due to supply shocks from the US-Israeli war with Iran.
Wright said the release is part of a broader release of 400m barrels of oil agreed to by the 32-country International Energy Agency earlier in the day. He said the release will begin next week and will take approximately 120 days to deliver.
But oil prices continued to rise amid strikes on tankers in the Middle East, as Americans feel the pinch. Gas prices have surged from a nationwide average of $2.94 per gallon a month ago to $3.58 as of Wednesday, according to AAA.
Catch up with the day’s biggest stories here:
Trump tells Kentucky rally Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities degraded
Donald Trump told hundreds of supporters assembled inside a packaging plant in northern Kentucky on Wednesday that Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities had been significantly degraded.
“Their drones are down 85%, we’re blowing up their factories,” he told an ecstatic audience in Hebron.
“They don’t know what the hell hit them,” said Trump.
While not offering further details on when the 10-day-old conflict may end, the president seemed to suggest that might not be soon.
“We don’t want to go back every two years. We’re going to finish the job,” he said.
Trump pressures Republican Senate leader over strict voter ID bill
Donald Trump hit back at Republican Senate majority leader John Thune over the latter’s refusal to alter rules to force a vote on the Save America Act, a sprawling bill that would upend elections for American voters amid the midterms. Trump delivered a blunt message for Thune to reporters outside the White House on Wednesday: “He’s got to be a leader.”
The comments came after Trump put on a full-court press over the bill, saying he would not sign any other legislation until the Save America Act came to his desk to sign.
US responsible for deadly missile strike on Iran school, inquiry says
A preliminary US military investigation has reportedly determined that Washington was responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school in February that killed scores of children.
According to the New York Times, quoting unnamed US officials and others familiar with the initial findings, the investigation has concluded that the strike on 28 February on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was the result of a targeting mistake by the US military planners.
Foreign hacker breached FBI servers holding Epstein files in 2023
A foreign hacker compromised files relating to the FBI’s investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a break-in at the bureau’s New York field office three years ago, according to a source familiar with the matter and recently published justice department documents reviewed by Reuters.
‘Unethical’ vaccine trial in Africa is ‘prototype’ for US studies, experts fear
New details are leading experts to fear that an “unethical” vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau is the “prototype” for studies under Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US department of health and human services and longtime vaccine critic. At the center of US vaccine policy is an unlikely set of Danish researchers whose work on the health effects of vaccines has been called into question.
What else happened today:
US inflation stayed flat at 2.4% in February, according to government data released Wednesday that provides a snapshot of the US economy before it was thrown into a tailspin by the US-Israel conflict with Iran.
A Democrat won a special election for a state house seat in New Hampshire, flipping a Republican district that Donald Trump carried and marking the latest in a string of 28 Democratic upsets that could usher in a blue wave in the midterms.
About 3,800 workers at JBS USA, the world’s largest meat producer, are set to strike on Monday in what will be the first labor strike in the industry in decades.
The appearance of a golden statue depicting Trump and Epstein as doomed lovers from the movie Titanic is confronting Washington with a murkier mystery.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 10 March 2026.
