‘That’s bullshit’: Democrats slam Trump’s claims that Iran hostilities ‘have been terminated’ – US politics live | US news
Democrats call ‘BS’ on Trump’s letter claiming Iran hostilities ‘have been terminated’
Senate Democrats called BS, literally, on Donald Trump’s claim that the war in Iran is over, in a formal letter the president sent on Friday to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate.
“There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026 have been terminated,” Trump wrote, as the ongoing war he claimed the US won in the first hour of combat continues with competing Iranian and US blockades of the Persian gulf.
“That’s bullshit,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, posted in response to the news. “This is an illegal war and every day Republicans remain complicit and allow it to continue is another day lives are endangered, chaos erupts, and prices increase, all while Americans foot the bill.”
Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking member of the Senate armed services committee, agreed.
“President Trump declaring the war with Iran ‘terminated’ doesn’t reflect the reality that tens of thousands of U.S. service members in the region are still in harm’s way, that the Administration continually threatens to escalate hostilities or that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and prices are skyrocketing at home,” Shaheen wrote. “President Trump entered this war without a strategy and without legal authorization and today’s announcement doesn’t change either fact.”
Key events
In Florida, Trump calls concerns about affordability ‘bullshit’, and repeats racist attack lines about Somalis
Donald Trump’s remarks to seniors in Florida are still going, but if you haven’t had time to tune in, don’t worry, the president is mostly saying nothing new, merely reciting what he thinks of his greatest hits, in a speech made up almost entirely of boasts, lies and attacks on his rivals he has made in previous speeches.
At one point, the president boasted about his performance on cognitive tests, confusing them with intelligence tests, in the exact same terms he had posted on social media this week.
The president, who instructed his lawyer during the 2026 campaign to threaten officials at the high school and colleges he attended with jail if they revealed his grades, then repeated a false claim he has made before about Barack Obama having been admitted to Harvard Law School despite bad grades as an undergraduate at Columbia. Before he ran for president, Trump pivoted from demanding that Obama release his birth certificate, which he did, to demanding that he release his college transcript.
He then went on to mock Democrats for drawing attention to the affordability crisis his policies have exacerbated, first through tariffs and now through the attack on Iran that has spiked fuel prices.
“The Democrats start screaming, ‘Affordability! Affordability!’ They’re the ones that caused the problem,” Trump said, putting on a comic accent as he pronounced the word “affordability”. “I’ll tell you what, they got one good line of bullshit,” the president added.
In one disturbing passage, Trump again attacked Somali Americans, in clearly racist terms.
“Somalia, it’s a beautiful place,” the president said with sarcasm. “It’s got no anything. It’s got one thing that’s really strong: crime. It’s got a lot of crime. They have no police. All they do is run around shooting each other. It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty. It’s a horrible place. They come here, and Ilhan Omar, you ever hear of her? She heads it.”
“Think of it,” the president said, riling up the crowd against the Minnesota congresswoman he has been singling out for racist abuse since his first term. “And then she comes here, from Somalia, and she tells us how to run the United States of America,” the president said to a chorus of boos from his supporters.
“She says, ‘the constitution gives me certain rights,’” the president said of the elected lawmaker, putting on, for some reason, a faux English accent. “Get the hell out, what a phony!”
As the crowd roared, the president mixed a lie with a viral conspiracy theory. “She married her brother to come in,” Trump claimed, falsely. Omar came to the US as a refugee from Somalia and obtained citizenship before briefly marrying a man she has insisted is not her brother and who is a British citizen. Despite years on scrutiny from reporters and rightwing bloggers, no evidence to support the viral claim that Omar married her brother has been found.
“Isn’t she despicable?” Trump asked. “Their whole life is based on fraud and a scam,” the president said of Somali Americans. “The whole thing is a scam and we ought to get those people the hell out of our country,” he said, to wild applause.
Trump repeats false claims and familiar grievances to seniors in Florida
Donald Trump is speaking to seniors in Florida now, against a background emblazoned with the words “Golden Age for your Golden Years”.
Before the president, who turns 80 in six weeks, took the stage to speak to his elderly supporters, the crowd was treated to a rally playlist that included the song Live and Let Die. The same song was previously a feature of Trump’s pre-speech playlist during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
In his rambling remarks, which the president himself noted was an example of the sort of wild swings in topic he has called “the weave”, the president repeated a number of previously debunked false claims, including:
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that 60 Minutes had broadcast an interview with Kamala Harris “the night before the election” in 2024 in which they replaced her answer to one question with an answer to a different question, to make her sound more coherent. In fact, the 60 Minutes interview with Harris was broadcast a month before the election and the answer Harris gave was edited, so that only part of what she said was used in the broadcast. Such editing is routine and, earlier this week, 60 Minutes edited out multiple long, rambling answers Trump gave during an interview on Sunday.
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that the BBC used AI to put words in his mouth that he never said in a documentary that quoted his speech to supporters before they stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021. “BBC has me AI, saying about hate. ‘We hate, we hate.’ I said, ‘That’s not me.’ They changed my lips. I couldn’t even tell myself,” Trump said. In fact, the BBC did not use AI and did not put words in Trump’s mouth. The broadcaster spliced together two parts of Trump’s remarks in a misleading edit that made it seem as if statements made early and late in the speech formed part of a single statement. The BBC has apologized for the edit, but Trump filed suit.
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that “25 million illegal aliens” were allowed to enter the United States during the Biden administration. In fact, according to estimates from the Center for Migration Studies of New York in 2024, just 10.9 million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, based on Census Bureau and American Community Service data. The Department of Homeland Security, had produced a similar estimate, that has now been removed from the web. About 40% of the undocumented population are also estimated to have overstayed their visas. The same estimate suggested number of undocumented in the US increased by just 650,000 from 2020 to 2022.
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that the administration has “removed 300,000 illegal aliens from the Social Security rolls and we’ve removed more than 100,000 migrants from Medicare eligibility”. In fact, the 2025 tax and spending law Trump signed passed by Republicans in Congress restricted access to affordable health care tax credits for many low-income immigrants considered “lawfully present”, including green card holders in their first five years of residency and people with temporary statuses. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, 300,000 lawfully present immigrants with low incomes were disqualified from those tax credits.
Democrats call ‘BS’ on Trump’s letter claiming Iran hostilities ‘have been terminated’
Senate Democrats called BS, literally, on Donald Trump’s claim that the war in Iran is over, in a formal letter the president sent on Friday to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate.
“There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026 have been terminated,” Trump wrote, as the ongoing war he claimed the US won in the first hour of combat continues with competing Iranian and US blockades of the Persian gulf.
“That’s bullshit,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, posted in response to the news. “This is an illegal war and every day Republicans remain complicit and allow it to continue is another day lives are endangered, chaos erupts, and prices increase, all while Americans foot the bill.”
Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking member of the Senate armed services committee, agreed.
“President Trump declaring the war with Iran ‘terminated’ doesn’t reflect the reality that tens of thousands of U.S. service members in the region are still in harm’s way, that the Administration continually threatens to escalate hostilities or that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and prices are skyrocketing at home,” Shaheen wrote. “President Trump entered this war without a strategy and without legal authorization and today’s announcement doesn’t change either fact.”
Voting rights groups sue to block Louisiana from suspending primary elections
George Chidi
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of Louisiana voting rights groups today, asking a state court to block the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, and secretary of state, Nancy Landry, from suspending congressional elections.
Landry suspended the state’s congressional primary election yesterday – even after early voting had begun – to enact new districts for the 2026 election. The move came after the supreme court’s 6-3 decision in the Louisiana v Callais case on Wednesday, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act and declared that a Louisiana congressional district with a majority-nonwhite voting population violated equal protection provisions of the US constitution.
Other races on the ballot, as well as votes for amendments to Louisiana’s constitution, will continue, according to Landry’s order. While the congressional race will remain on the ballot, its votes will not be counted, Landry ordered.
The League of Women Voters of Louisiana, the Louisiana state conference of the NAACP, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, and three individual voters filed suit in a state court in Baton Rouge today, seeking a temporary restraining order. They argued that an order delaying an election had only previously been issued “due to natural disasters or similar emergencies that posed threats to health and safety”, and that a supreme court decision did not constitute state of emergency under Louisiana law.
“Furthermore, the executive order sows chaos into an already-confusing election and puts Louisianians’ votes at risk, especially those who have already cast absentee ballots,” the NAACP said in a prepared statement.
Trump says he doesn’t need congressional authorization for military operations in Iran, citing ceasefire
Donald Trump said in letters sent to Congress today stating that, due to the ceasefire, he doesn’t need congressional authorization for military operations in Iran – despite the conflict reaching the 60-day mark this week and despite US armed forces remaining in the region – and that he considers the war “terminated”.
“On April 7, 2026, I ordered a two-week ceasefire. The ceasefire has since been extended. There has been no exchange of fire between the United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated,” Trump wrote in the letters, one of which was sent to the House and one to the Senate.
But he also suggested the war isn’t actually over, adding:
double quotation mark Despite the success of United States operations against the Iranian regime and continued efforts to secure a lasting peace, the threat posed by Iran to the United States and our Armed Forces remains significant.I have and will continue to direct United States Armed Forces consistent with my responsibilities and pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.
Trump says he’s not satisfied with Iran’s latest proposal for talks
Donald Trump said earlier that he was not satisfied with the latest Iranian proposal for talks on the Iran war, while Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran was ready for diplomacy if the United States changes its approach.
It comes after Iranian state media and a Pakistani official said Iran had submitted its latest proposal for negotiations, raising some hope that a deadlock in efforts to end the war might be broken.
“They want to make a deal, but … I’m not satisfied with it,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House to head to Florida, adding that the Iranian leadership was “very disjointed” and split into two or three groups.
Trump also praised Pakistan’s mediation efforts, saying negotiations by phone were continuing.
“They’ve made strides, but I’m not sure if they ever get there,” Trump said. “They’re asking for things that I can’t agree to.”
Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said his country was ready to pursue diplomacy if the United States changes what he called its “excessive approach, threatening rhetoric and provocative actions”.
However, Araghchi added in a post on his Telegram channel that “Iran’s armed forces remained ready to defend the country against any threat”.
Here’s my colleague Lisa O’Carroll’s report:
Further to that last post and in line with what the White House official told Reuters, Donald Trump told reporters a short while ago that his administration will raise tariffs on cars imported from the EU because it had not adhered to the trade deal.
“We raised the tariffs on cars coming in from the European Union because the European Union was not adhering to the trade deal we have,” Trump told reporters outside the White House.
He said some European companies, however, are building plants in the United States and said when they open, “there won’t be any tariffs”.
“But we raised the tariffs because they were not, as usual, they were not adhering to the agreement that we have,” he continued. “We have a trade deal with the European Union. They were not adhering to it. So I raised the tariffs on cars and trucks to 25% – that’s billions of dollars coming into the United States, and it forces them to move their factory production much faster.”
EU trade official calls Trump tariff threat ‘unacceptable’
Following Donald Trump’s threat to slap a higher 25% tariff on truck and car imports from the European Union, Bernd Lange, the chairman of the EU parliament’s trade committee, responded immediately:
double quotation mark President Trump’s behaviour is unacceptable.This latest move demonstrates just how unreliable the US side is.
We have already witnessed these arbitrary attacks from the US in the case of Greenland; this is no way to treat close partners.
Trump last year imposed a 25% tariff on global automotive imports under a national security trade law, but reached a deal with the EU in August to lower those duties to a net 15%, inclusive of prior duties.
In exchange, the EU agreed to eliminate duties on US industrial goods, including autos, and accept US safety and emissions standards on vehicles.
EU lawmakers advanced legislation in March to implement the tariff reductions, but the process is not expected to be completed before June, as EU governments and the European parliament negotiate final texts.
Asked to explain Trump’s latest move, a Trump administration official told Reuters:
double quotation mark The EU has not complied with the autos deal after eight months.
‘I’m not happy with the delivery of the weapons,’ says Trump about US weapons intended for Iranian protesters
Donald Trump said “I’m not happy” in regards to reports of US weapons intended for Iranian protesters being sent to Kurdish Iranian opposition groups in Iraq.
“I’m not happy with the delivery of the weapons. I’m not thrilled with it, but a small amount of weapons were sent, and we’ll see who has them. But I’m not happy with what happened with the Kurds. The Kurds did not deliver the weapons,” he said.
He also said that he was “not happy” with both Italy and Spain, countries which he said “feel [that] it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
“Anybody that feels it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon is not very smart,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
In regards to a question on whether he is considering new strikes on Iran, Donald Trump told reporters on Friday: “Why would I tell you that?”
He went to explain why his administration is not seeking congressional approval to extend the US’s ongoing war with Iran amid the ongoing ceasefire, saying:
double quotation mark “Because it’s never been sought before … Nobody’s ever gotten it before, they consider it totally unconstitutional but we’re always in touch with Congress. Nobody’s ever sought it before, nobody’s ever asked for it before … why should we be different?”
Friday marks the 60-day deadline set by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires Congress to declare war or authorize military action – unless the president requests an extension, allowing up to 90 days.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Donald Trump addressed concerns over military inventory as a result of the US’s war with Iran, saying:
double quotation mark “We have more than we’ve ever had, actually, because all over the world, we have inventory, and we can take that if we need it. But all over the world, we have tremendous amounts of inventory. The best, for instance, we’re stocked and locked and loaded right now, we have more than double what we had when this started.”
He also addressed rising fuel prices as a result of the war which have placed many American families in a financial chokehold, saying:
double quotation mark “When the war ends, gasoline prices will go down to the lowest … Our country is getting stronger and stronger … The amount of oil and gas that we’re selling now is at a level that nobody’s ever seen before.”
Trump places more sanctions on Cuba
Donald Trump has issued a new wave of sanctions on the Cuban government, according to two White House officials who spoke to Reuters.
In addition to agents, officials and government supporters, the sanctions target people, entities and affiliates that support the Cuban government’s security apparatus or are complicit in corruption or serious human rights violations, the officials said.
No specific details were provided on the latest individuals and entities to be sanctioned by the Trump administration.
As reactions, particularly from European leaders and members of Congress, begin to emerge following Donald Trump’s latest tariff announcement, former president Joe Biden has issued his first endorsement of the 2026 midterm cycle.
In a video on Friday, Biden announced his support for Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s former mayor who is running in Georgia’s gubernatorial race.
“As mayor of Atlanta, Keisha faced every challenge a leader could face, and then some – a global pandemic, a major cyber-attack on the city system, economic uncertainty that tested every community across Georgia,” Biden said, adding: “She handled the law with steady leadership.”
He went on to say: “And then she came to the White House, served as a senior adviser. And I’ll tell you, those same qualities that made her a great mayor made her invaluable to our administration. Smart, focused, gets things done. Georgia, she’s ready. She’s been ready.”
According to a March 20/20 Insight poll, Bottoms leads her Democratic competitors with 32%, well ahead of former state senator Jason Eves at 14%, former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan at 12%, and former DeKalb county CEO Michael Thurmond at 11%.
Trump says he will raise tariffs on EU autos to 25%
Donald Trump has announced that he will be increasing tariffs on cars and trucks from the European Union to 25%.
In a post on Truth Social, the president said:
double quotation mark I am pleased to announce that, based on the fact the European Union is not complying with our fully agreed to Trade Deal, next week I will be increasing Tariffs charged to the European Union for Cars and Trucks coming into the United States. The Tariff will be increased to 25%. It is fully understood and agreed that, if they produce Cars and Trucks in U.S.A. Plants, there will be NO TARIFF. Many Automobile and Truck Plants are currently under construction, with over 100 Billion Dollars being invested, A RECORD in the History of Car and Truck Manufacturing. These Plants, staffed with American Workers, will be opening soon — There has never been anything like what is happening in America today!
The US Treasury has warned shippers they could face sanctions if they pay tolls to Iran in exchange for safe transit through the strait of Hormuz, even if those payments are in the form of charitable donations to Iranian NGOs.
In an advisory note, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said it was aware of Iranian demands for payments for safe passage through the strait. It said Iran could offer “several payment options, including fiat currency, digital assets, offsets, informal swaps, or other in-kind payments, such as nominally charitable donations made to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Bonyad Mostazafan, or Iranian embassy accounts”.
It went on: “OFAC is issuing this alert to warn US and non-US persons about the sanctions risks of making these payments to, or soliciting guarantees from, the Iranian regime for safe passage. These risks exist regardless of payment method.”
