Trump finds time to pursue social media feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene Before Donald Trump stepped into his meeting with Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, and as the ceasefire with Iran seemed to be falling apart on its first day, the president found time to continue a social-media feud with his former close ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump, whose pre-presidential career was animated by similar social-media spats with celebrities, gloated on his own platform over the success of his hand-picked candidate to replace Greene in Congress.
“Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown’s (GREEN TURNS TO BROWN UNDER STRESS!) seat in Congress has been taken over by a wonderful and talented man, Clay Fuller, who won convincingly,” Trump wrote after Fuller won a special election to retain Greene’s seat for the Republicans in a conservative district of Georgia. “Congratulations to Clay Fuller, a very large improvement over his deranged predecessor!” the president added.
Trump also noted that he had won the heavily Republican district by almost 37 points in the 2024 presidential election, but that only served to underscore the size of the swing to the Democrats, whose candidate in Tuesday’s special election, came within 12 points of the Trump-endorsed Republican, Clay Fuller.
In 2022, then Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene joined then Fox News host Tucker Carlson and then former President Donald Trump to watch a Saudi-backed golf tournament at Trump’s New Jersey golf course. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA As voters went to the polls on Tuesday, Greene had replied to Trump’s threat to erase Iranian civilization by calling on the cabinet and Congress to remove the president through the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness,” the recently resigned congresswoman wrote on X.
Greene’s replacement, Fuller, is a former judge advocate general in the US air force, who joins Congress in the wake of the president’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, which is a clear war crime according to many of his former colleagues.
Minutes after Trump’s post on Wednesday, Greene responded by pointing out that, despite Trump’s boast about the value of his endorsement of Fuller, her former district “was never in danger of flipping” to the Democrats, and noted that while she had defeated the Democratic candidate Shawn Harris by nearly 29 points in 2024, Fuller only beat Harris on Tuesday by less than 12 points.
“Trump flipping MAGA from America First to America Last, covering up for the Epstein files, and betraying key campaign promises of no more foreign wars has been the best help for the Democrats,” Greene wrote. “Sad!”
Key events
Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature
Closing summary This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but the Guardian’s round-the-clock coverage of the crisis in the Middle East continues. Here are the latest developments in US politics:
After a private meeting at the White House with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, Donald Trump seemed to renew his threats against the defensive military alliance for not helping fight the US-Israeli war on Iran, and hinted he could again try to seize Greenland from Nato member Denmark.
Before Trump stepped into his meeting with the Nato secretary-general, and as the ceasefire with Iran seemed to be falling apart on its first day, the president found time to continue a social-media feud with his former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Speaking to reporters in Hungary, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed not to recognize the name of the Vatican ambassador to the US when he was asked about reports that a Pentagon official had reprimanded that Catholic diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, over the American-born pope’s opposition to US militarism.
At a Pentagon press conference, Pete Hegseth said that Iran “begged for this ceasefire”, and claimed that Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats would force a vote on a war powers resolution to limit the administration’s military campaign in Iran when Congress returns from recess next week.
The US justice department announced that the FBI arrested Courtney Williams, a military veteran who later worked in support of Delta Force, a covert commando unit, after she was indicted for “alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist”.
Trump, who announced with some fanfare last year a doubling of tariffs on imported steel, plans to use tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel to build his $400m White House ballroom, the New York Times reported.
Japanese television forced to explain to viewers that Taco jokes about Trump have nothing to do with octopus Donald Trump’s last-minute decision this week to put off his threatened strikes on Iranian infrastructure led to a raft of jokes on social media based on what the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong calls his “Taco theory”, the principle that the president’s pattern of bluster and retreat on a host of issues from tariffs to war can usually be described this way: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
But as the clock ticked ever closer to Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for what he insisted would be an end to Iranian civilization, that Taco acronym caused a lot of confusion in Japan, because the term sounds exactly like the Japanese word for octopus, tako.
To clear up that confusion, Japan’s Fuji News Network devoted an entire segment to helping viewers understand the origins of the term, and how it might be used to predict the volatile president’s behavior.
A segment from Japan’s Fuji News Network this week explaining that Donald Trump’s behavior has nothing to do with an octopus. A federal judge in Boston has blocked an effort by the Trump administration to remove legal protections from over 5,000 Ethiopians that have allowed them to live and work in the United States.
The ruling on Wednesday by US district judge Brian Murphy marked the latest legal setback for the US Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to terminate the Temporary Protected Status designation for citizens of 13 countries seeking safety in the United States to further of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.
Democratic senator says Israel ‘must stop’ deadly attacks on Lebanon Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator who sits on the Senate foreign relations committee, called on Israel to stop the intense and deadly bombing of Lebanon, which intensified on Wednesday, in apparent violation of a Pakistani-brokered ceasefire.
“Israel must stop these attacks,” Murphy wrote on X in response to video of the Israeli bombing of Beirut. “No matter how incompetently negotiated this ceasefire was, we should all want it hold. But that means all parties to this regional war – the U.S., Iran, Israel, and Iran’s proxies – must stand down.”
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announced on the same social media platform early on Wednesday: “I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”
Trump plans to use imported steel for his White House ballroom – report Donald Trump, who announced with some fanfare last year that he was doubling tariffs on imported steel to 50% during a rally at a US Steel plant outside Pittsburgh, plans to use tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel to build his $400m White House ballroom, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Donald Trump promised tariffs on imported steel would protect the jobs of American steelworkers at a rally at a US Steel plant in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania in May 2025. Photograph: David Dermer/AP ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based steel-maker, is providing steel for the structure, two unnamed sources told the Times. The sources said the steel was produced in Europe.
The White House has not disclosed details of the donation, but Trump said last October that he had been offered a donation of steel for the ballroom valued at $37m.
Trump renews threats against Nato and Greenland after meeting Nato secretary-general After an unusual private meeting at the White House on Wednesday with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, Donald Trump seemed to renew his threats against the defensive military alliance for not helping fight the US-Israeli war on Iran, and hinted he could again try to seize Greenland from Nato member Denmark.
Trump, who normally revels in conducting public meetings with visiting dignitaries on television, initially made no statement on what was discussed with Rutte, but after the former Dutch prime minister who leads the military alliance went on CNN to cast the talk as a “frank and open” discussion “between friends”, the president issued a blistering, all-caps social media post aimed at further unsettling Nato.
“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” the president wrote in a manner that did little to dispel concerns that he might try to withdraw from the military alliance.
Rutte, who has drawn criticism in Europe for seeming to endorse Trump’s decision to launch a war of choice against Iran without consulting Nato allies, and then scolding them for not helping to deal with its consequences, told CNN that “some” Nato members had failed in their response to Trump’s angry demand that they take part in the war on Iran by forcing open the strait of Hormuz.
After no Nato country responded to Trump’s demand for help, he announced that the US did not want or need any such help.
“I really admire his leadership,” Rutte also said of Trump, while refusing to say whether he left the meeting reassured that the US would remain in Nato, or alarmed that Trump might try to withdraw from it.
Asked if he believed Nato countries were tested and failed, Rutte said: “Some of them yes, but a large majority of European countries, and that’s what we discussed today, have done what they promised before in a case like this.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that withdrawing from Nato is something the president “has discussed” and would likely raise with the secretary general.
Before his meeting with Trump, a jovial Rutte posed with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, at the state department.
Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte shared a laugh with US secretary of state Marco Rubio on Wednesday. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images While Trump has spoken as if he has the power to pull the US out of Nato, a 2023 law, co-sponsored by then-senator Rubio, requires Senate approval, or an act of Congress before a president can suspend, terminate or withdraw US membership in Nato.
At the time, Rubio said the law would “ensure that current and future US presidents cannot leave Nato without rigorous debate and consideration by the US Congress with the input of the American people”.
Reporter attacks ‘low-quality lawyering from Trump’s DOJ’ in complaint against whistleblower Seth Harp, a journalist who based parts of his book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, on interviews with Courtney Williams, an army veteran who worked with US special forces, condemned the Trump administration’s arrest of Williams on Wednesday on social media.
“The FBI is incapable of solving real crimes, like all the murders on Fort Bragg involving elite soldiers trafficking drugs, so they settle for retaliating against courageous whistleblowers like Courtney Williams, whose only ‘crime’ was telling the truth about Delta Force,” Harp just wrote in response to an X post from Kash Patel, the FBI director, about the arrest.
“Typical low-quality lawyering from Trump’s DOJ,” Harp wrote in another post, which showed a page from the criminal complaint against Williams filed on Wednesday in federal court in North Carolina which referenced him arranging for his source to mail him a computer drive.
“The jump drive ‘likely contained classified NDI’?” the journalist wrote in reference to the assumption by prosecutors that the drive had secret national defense information on it. “That’s the standard for indicting someone?”
“News flash,” he added, “the drive contained an incredibly boring and tedious 100% public EEOC complaint THAT WAS TOO BIG TO SEND VIA EMAIL”.
FBI arrests former special forces employee for allegedly leaking classified information to a journalist The US justice department announced on Wednesday that the FBI has arrested Courtney Williams, a military veteran who later worked in support of Delta Force, a covert US commando unit, after she was indicted for her “alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist”.
The criminal complaint against Williams, filed in federal court in North Carolina, details communication between Williams and a journalist who is not named, but, as the legal journalist Chris Geidner notes, the reporter Seth Harp wrote about Williams in his book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, and in an excerpt from the book published by Politico last year.
According to complaint, investigators found that someone using Williams’s phone had spoken with a journalist for nearly five hours, and “exchanged approximately 180 text messages with the Journalist between 2022 and 2025”.
Harp provided the following statement on the charging of Williams to WRAL, a North Carolina news station:
“Courtney Williams is a brave whistleblower and truth-teller. Former Delta Force operators disclose ‘national defense information’ on podcasts and YouTube shows every day, but the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit. This is a vindictive act of retaliation, plain and simple.”
The arrest was celebrated on social media by the FBI director, Kash Patel.
“Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: we’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests,” Patel wrote. “This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way.”
Vance claims not to know Vatican ambassador reportedly reprimanded by Pentagon Speaking to reporters in Hungary on Wednesday, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed not to recognize the name of the Vatican ambassador to the United States when he was asked about reports that a Pentagon official had reprimanded the Catholic diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, over the American-born pope’s opposition to US militarism.
Vance, whose new book is about his conversion to Catholicism, then acknowledged that he had met the cardinal, who has represented the church in Washington DC since 2016, and hosted a prayer breakfast that Vance spoke at last year, but the vice-president suggested that he had no idea if the reporting, that a senior Pentagon official, Elbridge Colby, had indeed summoned the cardinal in January.
According to reporting from the conservative Free Press, confirmed on Wednesday by the newsletter Letters From Leo, Colby and his aides were enraged by Pope Leo’s January declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
“America,” Colby and his colleagues reportedly told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
According to Letters From Leo, “some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.”
As close observers of Vance’s career have pointed out, it was hard to believe that he had not heard about the reported meeting before being asked about it, given the central role Catholicism plays in his public persona, and the fact that he personally introduced his friend Colby at the Pentagon official’s Senate confirmation hearing last year.
Colby, also a Catholic, is the grandson of William Colby, a devout Catholic who served as CIA director for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. William Colby’s daughters celebrated their first communions at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome while he was posted there for the CIA during the 1950s.
The journalist Seymour Hersh said in a 2011 documentary by Carl Colby, one of the CIA director’s sons, that the late CIA director had been a source for Hersh’s reporting in the 1970s that revealed illegal domestic spying by the CIA.
Trump finds time to pursue social media feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene Before Donald Trump stepped into his meeting with Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, and as the ceasefire with Iran seemed to be falling apart on its first day, the president found time to continue a social-media feud with his former close ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump, whose pre-presidential career was animated by similar social-media spats with celebrities, gloated on his own platform over the success of his hand-picked candidate to replace Greene in Congress.
“Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown’s (GREEN TURNS TO BROWN UNDER STRESS!) seat in Congress has been taken over by a wonderful and talented man, Clay Fuller, who won convincingly,” Trump wrote after Fuller won a special election to retain Greene’s seat for the Republicans in a conservative district of Georgia. “Congratulations to Clay Fuller, a very large improvement over his deranged predecessor!” the president added.
Trump also noted that he had won the heavily Republican district by almost 37 points in the 2024 presidential election, but that only served to underscore the size of the swing to the Democrats, whose candidate in Tuesday’s special election, came within 12 points of the Trump-endorsed Republican, Clay Fuller.
In 2022, then Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene joined then Fox News host Tucker Carlson and then former President Donald Trump to watch a Saudi-backed golf tournament at Trump’s New Jersey golf course. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA As voters went to the polls on Tuesday, Greene had replied to Trump’s threat to erase Iranian civilization by calling on the cabinet and Congress to remove the president through the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness,” the recently resigned congresswoman wrote on X.
Greene’s replacement, Fuller, is a former judge advocate general in the US air force, who joins Congress in the wake of the president’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, which is a clear war crime according to many of his former colleagues.
Minutes after Trump’s post on Wednesday, Greene responded by pointing out that, despite Trump’s boast about the value of his endorsement of Fuller, her former district “was never in danger of flipping” to the Democrats, and noted that while she had defeated the Democratic candidate Shawn Harris by nearly 29 points in 2024, Fuller only beat Harris on Tuesday by less than 12 points.
“Trump flipping MAGA from America First to America Last, covering up for the Epstein files, and betraying key campaign promises of no more foreign wars has been the best help for the Democrats,” Greene wrote. “Sad!”
Here’s a recap of the day so far
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats in the upper chamber would force a vote on a war powers resolution to limit the administration’s military campaign in Iran when Congress returns from recess next week. “This war has made us worse off today than before it started,” Schumer said at a press conference in New York, noting the cost of the war and the effect on gas prices. “This is one of the very worst military and foreign policy actions that the United States has ever taken.”
During a White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt chided the press for allegedly “misreporting” that Donald Trump is working from the original 10-point plan put forward by Tehran. She offered a muddled explanation about which proposal the administration agreed to, but said that Iran actually put forward a “more reasonable and entirely different and condensed plan to the president”. Leavitt also confirmed that the ceasefire deal with Iran does not include Lebanon, noted that JD Vance would lead negotiating talks with the Iranian regime in Islamabad over the weekend, defended the president’s social media threats to eradicate a “whole civilization”, and warned that any further disruption to the strait of Hormuz is “completely unacceptable”.
The House oversight committee has signaled it will continue to seek testimony from former attorney general Pam Bondi after she was ousted from her role last week. A committee spokesperson said the justice department informed the panel Bondi would no longer appear for a 14 April deposition, since she was subpoenaed as in her capacity as attorney general. The top oversight Democrat, Robert Garcia, said in a statement on Wednesday that Bondi was “trying to get out of her legal obligation to testify”. If Bondi defies the subpoena, Garcia added, “we will begin contempt charges in Congress”.
At a Pentagon press conference, Pete Hegseth said that Iran “begged for this ceasefire”, and claimed that Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military. He went on to extol that the two-week ceasefire signals a decisive victory, and listed several Iranian officials who have been killed since the war began at the end of February. “The new Iranian regime was out of options and out of time, so they cut a deal,” Hegseth said.
Despite the ongoing congressional recess, House Democrats will ask unanimous consent to pass a war powers resolution during tomorrow’s pro forma session, according to a source familiar.
Representative Glenn Ivey, of Maryland, will lead the effort, and invite all members who are in Washington tomorrow to join.
The motion is unlikely to succeed, since a single objection would block unanimous consent and require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.
In a short while, Donald Trump will hold a meeting with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general.
Rutte has arrived at the White House, but as of now sit-down is still closed to the press.
Earlier, Karoline Leavitt told reporter that withdrawing from Nato is something the president “has discussed” and will likely discuss further with the secretary general. This comes after Trump has routinely criticized the alliance for the reluctance of member countries to offer support for the US military campaign in Iran.
During her press briefing today, the press secretary confirmed that the ceasefire deal with Iran does not include Lebanon, where Israel continues to launch strikes, and that has “been relayed to all parties”.
In a concurrent address, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, echoed the news from Washington, as his country continues its attacks against Hezbollah. According to Lebanon’s civil defence, Israeli attacks have killed at least 254 people across the country today.
Leavitt also noted that Trump is dispatching his negotiating team, led by JD Vance, and special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to Islamabad for talks this weekend.
“The first round of those talks will take place on Saturday morning local time, and we know we look forward to those in-person meetings,” she said.
White House defends Trump’s comments threatening to wipe out a ‘whole civilization’ During today’s press briefing, Karoline Leavitt defended the president’s comments on Truth Social that a “whole civilization” would die if a deal with Iran was not reached.
“[Trump’s] very tough rhetoric and his tough negotiating style is what has led to the result that you are all witnessing today,” Leavitt said. “It was the Iranians who backed down, not President Trump.”
The press secretary went on to say that Trump “absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime”.