Trump news: President threatens Iran with 'obliteration' as Melania announces new White House press secretary
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Donald Trump has threatened Iran with “obliteration” if the country launches any attack on US forces.
“Iran’s very ignorant and insulting statement, put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality”, Mr Trump tweeted Tuesday morning.
His comments came after Iranian president Hassan Rouhani hit out at the “hard-hitting” sanctions introduced by the Donald Trump administration on Monday against the country’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, calling the action “mentally retarded” in a live TV address.
Speaking at the White House later in the day, Donald Trump said: “We were going to end up in a war if it kept going in the way it was going ... The deal was no good” adding that the US is ready for “whatever” Iran wants to do.
Meanwhile, Melania Trump announced that the new White House press secretary will be her spokesperson, Stephanie Grisham
Trump 2020 launch: Fascist Proud Boys, baby blimps and Uncle Sam
Show all 30When questioned about the news in the Oval Office, Mr Trump said: “Stephanie has been with me from the beginning ... I think she’s very talented a lot of people wanted the job ... I asked people who do you like and so many people said Stephanie.”
The president then said Stephanie Grisham accepted this morning and that the first lady “is very happy for her.”
In the latest US-Mexico border developments, the acting chief of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), John Sanders, is expected to resign from his post. The announcement comes amid public outcry over the squalid conditions migrant children face in Texas shelters.
Speaking about the resignation of John Sanders, Mr Trump said: “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him ... I don’t know anything about him” before quickly adding “I hear he’s a very good man.”
In other White House news, the president has continued to deny the historic rape accusation made against him by New York writer E Jean Carroll, insisting he could not have done it because the alleged victim is “not my type”.
Catch up on events as they happened
The director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Robert Ashley, told Fox News on Monday that the intelligence community continued to assess that Kim Jong-un was not ready to give up his nuclear weapons.
Stephen Biegun, the US special envoy for North Korea, said on Wednesday that Washington had no preconditions for talks but that progress would require meaningful and verifiable North Korean steps to denuclearise.
The State Department said Biegun, who led working-level talks with North Korea in the run-up to the Hanoi summit, would visit Seoul from Thursday until Sunday for meetings with South Korean officials.
Tension mounted last month when North Korea test-fired a series of short-range ballistic missiles, although Trump and South Korea both played down the tests.
On 11 June, Trump said he had received a very warm, "beautiful" letter from Kim, adding he thought something positive would happen.
North Korea's state news agency, KCNA, said on Sunday that Kim had received a letter from Trump, which he described as being "of excellent content", but did not disclose any details.
KCNA said Kim "would seriously contemplate the interesting content".
Pompeo, who will also be in Seoul for Trump's visit, did not discuss the contents of the president's letter, but said Washington had been working to lay foundations for discussions.
"I think we're in a better place," he said.
Asked if working-level discussions would begin soon, Pompeo said: "I think the remarks you saw out of North Korea this morning suggest that may well be a very good possibility. We're ready to go, we're literally prepared to go at a moment's notice if the North Koreans indicate that they're prepared for those discussions."
Russia is saying this morning it has military intelligence showing that the US drone shot down by Iran last week was in Iranian airspace at the time and Tehran was therefore justified in its actions.
Speaking at a briefing for journalists in Jerusalem, Nikolai Patrushev - secretary of Russia’s Security Council - also said evidence presented by the United States alleging Iran was behind attacks on ships in the Gulf of Oman was poor quality and unprofessional.
Despite some strong words from Tehran this morning, John Bolton believes Washington's pressure campaign against Iran would lead it to enter negotiations.
"They'll either get the point or... we will simply enhance the maximum pressure campaign further," Bolton told reporters after meeting his Russian and Israeli counteparts in Jerusalem.
"It will be, I think, the combination of sanctions and other pressure that does bring Iran to the table."
President Trump said yesterday he doesn't believe he needs congressional approval to in order to make a military strike against Iran but likes "the idea of keeping Congress abreast."
"I do like keeping them - they have ideas, they're intelligent people, they'll have some thoughts. I actually learned a couple of things the other day when we had our meeting with Congress, but I do like keeping them abreast, but I don't have to do it legally," he told The Hill.
Opinions on the subject differ on Capitol Hill.
"He must have the authority of Congress before we initiate military hostilities into Iran," Nancy Pelosi said on Friday after the cancellation of retaliatory air strikes.
But the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jim Inhofe, feels differently.
"You got to keep mind, Iran, they're a bunch of terrorists and they hate us. And we're at war with them," Inhofe told CNN. "And you know, this is serious stuff. And I don't think that we, I think the president could find himself in a position where he would have to do something and do something right away in the best interest, and he has the power to do that."
Inhofe argued Trump has the executive power to do so even if such a step falls outside the 2001 Authorisation for Use of Military Force, which was passed in the wake of 9/11 and permits immediate responses to terror attacks from the likes of al-Qaeda and Isis.
Alarmed by reports of the conditions prevailing at Border Patrol detention centres in Texas, members of the public have been seeking to donate goods to the children interred but are being turned away, reports The Texas Tribune.
In an attempt to put the Mueller report before the American public, a cast of Hollywood actors including Annette Benning, John Lithgow, Sigorney Weaver, Mark Hamill, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Zachary Quinto, Kevin Kline, Michael Shannon, Alyssa Milano, Alfre Woodard and Justin Long gave a dramatic reading of it in New York last night.
The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts by Robert Schenkkan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was billed as "a live play... ripped from the pages of the Mueller report".
Trump has reportedly moved to reassure Japan this morning he is committed to a military treaty that both nations have described as a cornerstone of security in Asia, after a media report said he had spoken privately about withdrawing from the pact.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Trump had discussed ending the pact which he believed is one-sided because it obligated the United States to defend Japan if attacked but did not require Tokyo to respond in kind.
The report said Trump was also unhappy with plans to relocate the US base on Japan's Okinawa island.
"The thing reported in the media you mentioned does not exist," chief government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters in Tokyo when asked about the report.
"We have received confirmation from the US president it is incompatible with the US government policy," he added.
Under the security agreement, the United States has committed to defend Japan, which renounced the right to wage war after its defeat in the Second World War.
Japan in return provides military bases that Washington uses to project power deep into Asia, including the biggest concentration of US Marines outside the United States on Okinawa and the forward deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group at the Yokosuka naval base near Tokyo.
Ending the pact, which also puts Japan under the US nuclear umbrella, could force Washington to withdraw a major portion of its military forces from Asia at a time when China's military power is growing.
It would also force Japan to seek new alliances in the region and bolster its own defences, which in turn could raise concern about nuclear proliferation in the already tense region.
Washington's close ties to Tokyo have also benefited US military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which have sold billions of dollars of equipment to Japan's Self Defense Forces.
On a visit to Japan in May, Trump said he expected Japan's military to reinforce US forces throughout Asia and elsewhere as Tokyo bolsters the ability of its forces to operate further from its shores.
Part of that military upgrade includes a commitment by Japan to buy 97 F-35 stealth fighters, including some short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL)B variants worth more than $8 billion.
Japan says it eventually wants to field a force of around 150 of the advanced fighter jets, the biggest outside the US military, as it tries to keep ahead of China's advances in military technology.
"I'm the only one who has actually won in a Trump state."
Here's Clark Mindock's interview with Montana governor and 2020 Democratic contender Steve Bullock.
Here's the folks on Fox and Friends speculating that Trump's acting Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan leaked information to the press to stop ICE agents carrying out mass deportations, giving the president little choice but to postpone the raids he had trailed on Twitter.
Donald Trump has been tweeting about the stock market, one of his favourite topics. In it, he rather-oddly thanks himself.
Digging into the numbers the the S&P 500 has seen a 7.3 per cent month-on-month jump as of the end of last week. That is the highest percentage gain month over month since 1955. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 7.8 per cent over the same period, the best performance since 1938.
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