Today’s contests will help shape the fiercely contested midterms this fall to determine control of Congress
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Attention turns to Florida and Alaska, where primaries later on Tuesday will highlight Republican-led redistricting efforts that have scrambled congressional maps.
Donald Trump voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary, Politico reports, citing Palm Beach County voting records. The White House has confirmed the president’s mail-in vote, according to the New York Times, which added that this is at least the third time the president has mailed his ballot.
A northern California county plans to hire Tina Peters, the prominent Colorado election denier recently released from prison, to work on elections. Shasta county, a conservative region home to 182,000 people, has emerged as a center of the US election denialism movement in recent years. California governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the state is investigating Peters’ hiring.
CNN has said it stands behind reporter Kristen Holmes after Trump repeatedly told the CNN reporter to “be quiet” and accused her of being “a fake reporter” during questioning over conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Shortly after the president reprimanded Holmes, the White House invoked her children in a social media post further attacking the reporter when she asked about comments from Democratic senator Jon Ossoff in a speech on Sunday. He had told a crowd that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” and instead “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar”. It was an apparent reference to Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant.
Trump again threatened to bomb Oman if it “gets in the way” of his effort to end the US-Israel war on Iran, as the two-month window to negotiate peace with Iran expired on Monday with no end to the conflict in sight. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News.
Trump said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had responded to his overtures after he ordered the US to scale back military exercises with South Korea. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump was asked why Kim had not responded to his overtures.
Continue reading...
