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
When 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
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has 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.
Rouhani said the sanctions against Khamenei would fail because he had no assets abroad, describing the latest round of sanctions as a sign of US desperation.
"Tehran's strategic patience does not mean we have fear," he added.
Trump signed the executive order in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon in the wake of his decision to cancel air strikes against the regime on Thursday night after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard shot down a US Navy Global Hawk surveillance drone it said had crossed into its airspace.
“We will continue to increase pressure on Tehran,” Trump said yesterday. “Never can Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
Tensions between Washington and Tehran have been high since Trump withdrew the US from a 2015 nuclear accord last year and were further inflamed when US secretary of state Mike Pompeo accused the regime of blowing up two foreign oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
Here's Clark Mindock and Borzou Daraghi.
US national security adviser John Bolton, speaking after the introduction of the sanctions, said Washington was still willing to talk to Iran.
"The president has held the door open to real negotiations to completely and verifiably eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons programme, its ballistic missile delivery systems, its support for international terrorism and other malign behaviour worldwide," Bolton said in Jerusalem.
"All that Iran needs to do is to walk through that open door."
But that's not how Iran sees it.
Foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said yesterday the "fruitless sanction on Iran's leadership and the chief of Iranian diplomacy mean the permanent closure of the road of diplomacy with the frustrated US administration".
Trump's sanctions (introduced not without at least one significant gaffe) target Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior military figures, denying them access to financial resources and assets they have under US jurisdiction. US officials also say they are planning sanctions against the country's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Washington says the measures were taken to discourage Tehran from developing nuclear weapons and supporting militant groups.
Mousavi's statement echoed that of Iran's UN ambassador, Majid Takht Ravanchi, who warned on Monday that the situation in the Persian Gulf was "very dangerous" and that any talks with the US were impossible in the face of escalating sanctions and intimidation.
Meanwhile, the US envoy at the United Nations, Jonathan Cohen, insisted the Trump administration's aim was to get Tehran back to negotiations.
The sanctions were announced as Mike Pompeo was holding talks in the Middle East with officials in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia about building a broad, global coalition that includes Asian and European countries to counter Iran.
Pompeo is likely to face a tough sell in Europe and Asia, particularly from those nations still committed to the 2015 nuclear deal.
The president has meanwhile 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”.
Speaking to The Hill in the Oval Office, Trump said Carroll was "totally lying".
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?," he added.
Carroll makes the allegation in her new memoir and appeared on CNN's New Day yesterday to give her account of the incident, which she says occurred in the changing rooms of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, in unflinching detail.
"He pulled down my tights, and it was a fight," she told anchor Alisyn Camerota. "I fought. It was over very quickly, and it was against my will, 100 per cent. I fought and then I ran away."
Trump emphatically denied the story over the weekend, claiming never to have met his accuser despite their being pictured together.
More than 20 women have come forward with allegations of sexual impropriety against the president.
Here's more from Adam Withnall.
Almost 250 children being held in a US Border Patrol detention centre in Clint, Texas, have meanwhile been moved into shelters after a public outcry over the squalid conditions they were forced to endure, with even their most basic needs going unmet.
A video of Trump administration lawyer Sarah Fabian went viral over the weekend in which she is seen arguing in court against the need for the state to provide the youngsters separated from their families with bedding, soap and toothbrushes, fundamental rights mandated by the Flores settlement's guarantee that children kept in government custody must be held in "safe and sanitary" confines.
The New Yorker meanwhile carried an interview with Warren Binford, a law professor who had visited the facility in Clint for an inspection and reported back on "filthy" cells, outbreaks of flu and lice and widespread neglect by guards.
Many were quick to point out the hypocrisy of the Trump administration refusing to pay out $10,000 (£7,835) for soap and toothpaste given that the president's regular weekend jaunts to his golf resorts have cost the American taxpayer some $100m (£78m) so far.
Even more embarrassing for the administration, people taken captive by the Taliban and by Somali pirates came forward to say their prison guards had ensured they had facilities to brush their teeth and wash, asking why the US government wouldn't do the same for innocent children.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi meanwhile took the president to task for his planned deportation raids against illegal immigrants, which were scheduled to be carried out by ICE agents this week but were postponed to allow for further negotiations with the Democrats on an alternative.
Pelosi says Trump's plan is "outside the circle of civilised human behaviour" and accused him of "scaring the children" of America.
Here's Andrew Buncombe on Pelosi's comments.
In the latest instance of White House stonewalling, Kellyanne Conway is being blocked from testifying before the House Oversight Committee after being accused of violating the Hatch Act.
White House lawyer Pat Cipollone wrote to chairman Elijah Cummings "respectfully declining" his invitation on behalf of the counselor to the president.
The act bars federal employees from engaging in political activity during work hours or on the job. But a report submitted to Trump earlier this month by the Office of Special Counsel - which a Trump appointee runs - found that Conway violated that law on numerous occasions by "disparaging Democratic presidential candidates while speaking in her official capacity during television interviews and on social media."
One victory Congress can cheer regarding Democratic investigations into the Trump administration is House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler securing the testimony of Annie Donaldson, ex-chief of staff to former White House counsel Don McGahn.
She won't appear until November, however, as she is pregnant but will answer written questions about her time working for the Trump camp in the meantime.
They would like to speak to McGahn himself, of course, but he has been advised against appearing in front of the panel by the White House, which has fought hard to stop its ex-staffers co-operating, resulting in the farcical Hope Hicks hearing last week, in which the former communications director was blocked from answering even the most rudimentary questions about her tenure, including where precisely her desk was situated.
As for the battle to get retired FBI special counsel Robert Mueller to come forward to explain his 448-page report into Russian election interference and obstruction of justice, patience is said to be wearing thin.
On E Jean Carroll, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post dropped its coverage of her rape allegation against Trump after one of the owner's cronies, Col Allan, intervened to suppress it, according to CNN.
"Nobody needs to explain why. We already know," a source inside the newsroom said.
Murdoch, whose empire also of course incorporates the president's favourite TV channel Fox News, is understood to have brought in Allan to steer the tabloid in an even more pro-Trump direction.
Satirist Stephen Colbert devoted his opening monologue to the Carroll allegation on The Late Show last night.
Colbert called her allegations "specific, credible and terrible" and pointed out she was the 22nd woman to speak against Trump on similar grounds. “Twenty-two women! That should raise alarms,” he said.
Trump will visit South Korea this weekend after an exchange of letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un boosted hopes for a resumption of talks aimed at ending its nuclear programme.
Trump is set to arrive in South Korea for a two-day visit on Saturday and will meet President Moon Jae-in on Sunday, following a summit of G20 leaders in Japan, Moon's spokeswoman Ko Min-jung said on Monday.
The announcement came hours after Mike Pompeo said he hoped a letter Trump sent to Kim could pave the way for a revival of talks that have been stalled since a failed second summit between Trump and Kim in February.
Trump and Moon would have "in-depth discussions on ways to work together to foster lasting peace," Ko told a news briefing.
Trump told reporters at the White House that Kim had sent him birthday wishes. "It was just a very friendly letter both ways. We have a very good relationship," he said.
Pompeo, who spoke of Trump's letter to Kim before leaving Washington on Sunday for a trip to the Middle East and Asia, said Washington was ready to resume talks with North Korea immediately.
"I'm hopeful that this will provide a good foundation for us to begin... these important discussions with the North Koreans," Pompeo told reporters.
Trump is considering a visit to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas, a South Korean official said.
A Trump administration official briefing reporters on a conference call said Trump had no plans to meet Kim during his visit to South Korea, and declined to comment when asked whether Trump would travel to the DMZ.
Trump wanted to go to the DMZ on a 2017 trip to South Korea but heavy fog prevented it. Kim and Moon held their historic first summit in the DMZ last year.
Trump and Kim held their first, groundbreaking summit in Singapore in June last year, agreeing to establish new relations and work towards the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
But a second summit in Vietnam in February collapsed when the two sides were unable to bridge differences between US demands for denuclearisation and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.
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.
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.
