This concludes our coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• The first lady, Melania Trump, read reporters an extraordinary statement denying that she ever had “a relationship” with Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

• “Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach,” the first lady said on Thursday. However, that contention is undermined by the fact that the most well-known images of the two couples together were taken at Trump’s own club, Mar-a-Lago, on 12 February 2000.

• While the first lady did mention in the statement she read aloud an email she sent to Maxwell, apparently in reference to a 2002 note signed, “Love, Melania”, that friendly correspondence was released by the justice department in January, offering no hint as to why she chose to address it now.

• Even normally well-sourced correspondents for rightwing outlets were at a loss to explain why the first lady felt the need to issue a statement denying that she had any relationship with Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with her husband for nearly two decades, or his accomplice Maxwell.

• The normally ever-present Donald Trump was out of sight all day, but the president spent hours on a social-media posting spree, complaining about perceived slights from Iran, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and four former supporters in the rightwing media who have criticized his war on Iran.

• 
  Besieged by questions about the deadly chaos he unleashed by attacking Iran and his wife’s statement on Epstein, Trump tried to shift the national conversation back to his immigration crackdown by posting graphic video of a woman in Florida being murdered last week by a man he called an illegal immigrant from Haiti.

Besieged by questions about the deadly chaos he unleashed by attacking Iran and his wife’s statement on Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender he socialized with for nearly two decades, Donald Trump tried to shift the national conversation back to his immigration crackdown by posting graphic, distressing video of a woman in Florida being murdered last week by a man he called an illegal immigrant from Haiti.

The video, taken by a surveillance camera outside a Fort Myers gas station, showed a man identified by authorities as a Haitian immigrant using a hammer to bludgeon the female clerk to death.

The video was originally surfaced by the Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin on Tuesday, when Trump was threatening to commit a war crime by bombing Iran’s civilian infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security told Fox that the suspected attacker in custody was “released” in 2022 by the Biden administration and given Temporary Protected Status.

It is unclear whether that information is accurate, but Trump has been trying to foment hatred of Haitians given temporary shelter in the US since his 2024 campaign, when he infamously made the false accusation that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there”.

The baseless conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating pets was first popularized that year by JD Vance, the Ohio senator who became Trump’s running mate. At the same time, Vance argued that Haitians who had a legal right to live and work in the United States with Temporary Protected Status should be considered “illegal” because the law had been abused.

The administration’s efforts to remove temporary protected status from Haitians and other immigrants seeking safety has been blocked by multiple courts.

The distressing video of the murder was first posted on social media earlier on Thursday by DHS, which slightly blurred the violent attack. When Trump shared the video, with a long caption railing against what the president wrongly called “Temporary Protective Status,” the video of the woman’s last moments was not blurred.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, commented that DHS And then Trump shared the video “for exactly as vile a reason as you can imagine; basically Breitbart’s old ‘black crime’ vertical as official government policy. There hasn’t been an administration this openly racist since Wilson invited the KKK to the White House.”

Reichlin-Melnick was referring to a section of the far-right website Breitbart which sowed racist hatred by focusing on violent crime committed by Black Americans and immigrants.

In 2019, the journalist Michael Edison Hayden obtained more than 900 emails sent to Breitbart editors in 2015 and 2016 by Stephen Miller, who is now Trump’s main domestic policy adviser, urging them to focus on violent crimes committed by people of color and immigrants.

While it remains unclear why Melania Trump chose to read a brief statement on Thursday distancing herself from Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender her husband socialized with for nearly two decades, reporters have sent much of the day trying to find out if the president knew that his wife was planning to draw attention back to a subject he has called for the public to move on from.

Shortly after the first lady delivered her statement, an MSNOW host reported that she had spoken by phone to Donald Trump, who said he did not “know anything about” the first lady’s statement before she appeared on camera. “She didn’t know him,” the president added before hanging up, apparently referring to Epstein.

The first lady was photographed with Epstein multiple times at a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago beach club in 2000. She acknowledged on Thursday that she had also written a friendly email to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in October 2002, signed “Love, Melania”. The first lady did not mention that her email included praise for a flattering profile of Epstein in New York magazine that came out that week, which she called a “Nice story”. That 2002 profile featured the following glowing quote from Donald Trump praising his friend and making reference to his attraction to young women:

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

A spokesperson for the first lady initially told the New York Times the president knew that his wife planned to make a statement. That report was later updated to note that the spokesperson “later said it was not clear if Mr. Trump was aware of the topic of her remarks.”

The US Senate Banking Committee is no longer planning to hold a confirmation hearing next week for Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Federal Reserve, Punchbowl News reports.

The committee’s calendar remains open, but the earliest date for a hearing now appears to be 21 April.

The same outlet had reported last month that the hearing would take place next week, if the nominee’s paperwork was submitted in time.

The delay means that a full Senate confirmation might not be complete before the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell, ends his term on 15 May.

Powell, who has not yet announced whether he will exercise the option to stay on the central bank’s board after his term as chair ends, could continue to lead the board until his replacement is confirmed.

The normally ever-present Donald Trump has been out of sight on Thursday, but the president spent much of the past two hours on a social-media posting spree, complaining about perceived slights from Iran, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and four former supporters in the rightwing media who have criticized his war on Iran.

“There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait — They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!” Trump warned in one post.

“Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” he wrote in another.

The gravity of those brief comments, however, was undermined by the fact that they were dwarfed by a series of far longer posts in which Trump poured quite a bit more energy into attacking the Wall Street Journal for an editorial headlined, “Trump Declares Premature Victory in Iran”, boasting about his plan to remake “the once beautiful Reflecting Pool” in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and claiming, falsely, that “Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years”.

In fact, the wartime president devoted more than 450 words to deriding those far-right media figures who had previously supported him as “NUT JOBS”, who host “Third Rate Podcasts”, and “have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!”

The president suggested that Carlson, a longtime supporter turned critic over Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran, was “broken” by being fired from Fox News in 2023 and “should see a good psychiatrist”.

However, Trump appeared on stage with Carlson, the former Fox News host, just days before the 2024 election, and the rightwing media star’s son, Buckley Carlson, is a deputy press secretary for JD Vance, Trump’s vice-president.

He dismissed Kelly, another supporter turned critic, as the person who once asked him, in a 2015 Fox Republican debate, about how he would answer the charge “that you are part of the war on women” since he had “called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”

Trump called Owens, “who accuses the Highly Respected First Lady of France of being a man, when she is not” both “crazy” and less beautiful than Brigitte Macron.

Finally Trump also attacked Jones, who called for Trump to be forced from office this week over Iran, as discredited by “his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.”

What Trump did not mention in his denunciation of Jones for spreading the conspiracy theory that the killing of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 was a hoax staged by the government, is that he had completely ignored that when he sat for a 30-minute interview with the Texas radio host in 2015.

At the end of that 2015 interview, Trump even told Jones: “I just want to finish by saying your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed I hope and I think we’ll be speaking a lot.”

In the same post, Trump complained about CNN and the New York Times reporting on the dissent over his war on Iran from these former supporters and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who also called this week for Trump to be removed from office.

“They’re not ‘MAGA,’ they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA. As President, I could get them on my side anytime I want to, but when they call, I don’t return their calls because I’m too busy on World and Country Affairs,” Trump added.

At the end of the written statement on Jeffrey Epstein that Melania Trump read aloud to reporters on Thursday, the first lady urged Congress to invite the victims of the late child sex offender’s victims to testify at a public hearing.

“I call on Congress to provide the women who have been victimized by Epstein with a public hearing specifically centered around the survivors,” the first lady said, after claiming to have had only a passing relationship with Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath in front of Congress, with the power of sworn testimony,” she continued. “Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the Congressional Record.”

Epstein survivors Maria and Annie Farmer responded with the following statement:

“We can’t speak for other survivors, but what we want is accountability, transparency, and justice. The federal government has long mismanaged the Epstein investigation by repeatedly ignoring survivors, violating their privacy, and refusing to release the remaining records held by the Department of Justice — including my complete FBI records from 1996. If the federal government is truly committed to supporting survivors, it would ask us what we want and should follow the facts wherever they may lead.”

Even normally well-sourced correspondents for rightwing outlets were at a loss to explain why Melania Trump felt the need to issue a statement on Thursday denying that she had any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with her husband for nearly two decades, or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich said that she and her team were baffled by the statement.

“We’ve been trying to understand why she made it today, if there was something that she is reacting to that might already be in the news that has upset her, or if there’s a story that’s yet to come out, that’s about to drop that she wanted to get ahead of,” Heinrich told Fox viewers. “Because it did feel like it came out of left field for us.”

“We’re still trying to figure out why she made this statement today,” she added. “I’ve called every contact in my phone, including the president, and not gotten any answers.”

The New York Post, which, like Fox, is owned by Rupert Murdoch and often acts like an arm of the Trump White House communications team, was also puzzled. “It’s unclear why the first lady chose to hold the press event at a time when the White House is trying to move on from the Epstein saga that has been a drag on her husband’s second term,” the New York tabloid reported.

Marc Beckman, a senior adviser to the first lady, told the Post only that she “spoke out now because enough is enough”.

“The lies must stop,” Beckman added in his cryptic statement. “It is time for the public and media to focus on her incredible achievements as First Lady, the lives she has positively impacted, and her commitment to our nation.”

While the first lady did mention in the statement she read aloud an email she sent to Maxwell, apparently in reference to a 2002 note signed, “Love, Melania”, that friendly correspondence was released by the justice department in January, offering no hint as to why she chose to address it now.

Trump suggested her own email was “trival,” apparently misreading the word “trivial” from her written statement, but the justice department also released Maxwell’s reply, which began with the term of endearment “Sweet pea”, which seems to undermine the first lady’s claim that the two were never friends.

In her extraordinary statement denying that she ever had “a relationship” with Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Melania Trump cast the existence of photographs of her and her husband, Donald Trump, with the notorious couple as an accidental result of having been invited to the same parties.

“I never been friends with Epstein,” the Slovenian-born first lady said, reading aloud from a written statement. “Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach,” she added.

However, that contention is undermined by the fact that the most well-known images of the two couples together were taken at Trump’s own club, Mar-a-Lago, on 12 February 2000.

Another photograph taken that same night shows that another Epstein friend, then Prince Andrew, was invited to the same party, and shared a laugh with the future first lady and Epstein.

“The first time I crossed paths with Epstein,” Melania Trump said in her statement on Thursday, “was in the year 2000 at an event Donald and I attended together.”

“Numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been calculating [sic] on social media for years now,” the first lady said, apparently misreading the word “circulating” from the written statement. “Be cautious about what you believe. These images and stories are completely false,” she added.

The Mar-a-Lago event was held just two days before Donald Trump appeared on the Today Show to announce that he was abandoning his bid to be the Reform Party’s presidential candidate in the 2000 election.

First Lady Melania Trump told reporters on Thursday that she “never had a relationship” with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. In a televised statement, it was unclear which specific accusations the first lady was responding to exactly.

“I [have] never been friends with Epstein,” she said in her public rebuke. “I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.”

The first lady went on to say that she and the president were invited to the same parties as Epstein “from time to time” as “overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach”.

In that interview with NBC News, Donald Trump also confirmed that he asked Benjamin Netanyahu to be “more low-key” in Lebanon as the US seeks to negotiate with Iran to bring the war to an end.

“I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it. I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key,” Trump said, adding that he believed Israel was “scaling back” its operations in Lebanon (again, there’s been no evidence of that yet).

Earlier, I brought you CNN’s report that the US president had made the request to the Israeli prime minister. NBC News heard the same, reporting that Trump asked Netanyahu to pull back on the strikes to help ensure the success of the upcoming negotiations in Islamabad.

Donald Trump has told NBC News that he is “very optimistic” a peace deal with Iran was within reach as a diplomatic delegation led by his vice-president JD Vance prepared to head to Pakistan for high-stakes talks aimed at ending the war this weekend.

Iran’s leaders “talk much differently when you’re at a meeting than they do to the press. They’re much more reasonable,” the president said, in line with his administration’s narrative that there’s a disconnect between what Tehran says publicly and privately.

Trump went on:

They’re agreeing to all the things that they have to agree to. Remember, they’ve been conquered. They have no military.

If they don’t make a deal, it’s going to be very painful.

After Republicans blocked Democrats passing a war powers resolution via unanimous consent earlier today, some Democratic representatives spoke to reporters on the steps of the US Capitol.

They appeared confident that when Congress returns next week, they will have at least a couple of House GOP members who are willing to buck their party and pass the resolution.

Given that the Republicans have a slim majority in the lower chamber, Democrats will only need fewer than a handful of lawmakers to join them.

Congresswoman Sara Jacobs, who sits on the House armed services and foreign affairs committees, said that she has yet to see an official temporary ceasefire proposal from the administration. This comes after the White House has offered conflicting messages about the terms of a 10 or 15-point agreement with Iran.

“That is part of why we are asking Speaker Johnson to call us back into session so that we can have those briefings and get a sense of what has actually been agreed to, what is really going on, what does this ceasefire really look like, and what is the plan and strategy ahead to get to a real durable end to this war, not just in Iran, but in the broader region,” Jacobs told reporters today.

The push from House Democrats to pass a war powers resolution by unanimous consent failed today after the pro forma speaker, Republican Chris Smith, did not recognize Democrats.

It was always a tall order, given that pushback from even a single member would require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.

While it’s largely a symbolic move, top Democrats in both chambers have vowed to hold votes again when Congress returns from recess next week.

Former congresswoman, and longtime Trump ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she would be willing to “go to the whiteboard, and begin to try to sketch something new” with Democratic representative Ro Khanna.

The pair have struck an unlikely alliance after Greene broke with the president last year and supported the bipartisan push to release the justice department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. She has also become an outspoken critic of the ongoing war in Iran since she left Congress earlier this year, and Khanna praised her rebuke of Trump’s threats that a “whole civilization will die” on social media this week.

“We both know the powerful political industrial complex of the Democrat and Republican parties will do anything to stop a right/left true America First coalition supported by ordinary Americans,” Greene said today, while reposting a video from Khanna. “This is likely the only way to break free of the corrupt system from both sides that controls everything, constantly goes to war, and only enriches themselves while average Americans continue to lose.”

On Wednesday, Trump renewed his feud with Greene. “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.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

Democratic party leaders have vowed to renew the effort to curb Donald Trump’s war in Iran after several days of escalating tactics that culminated in a temporary ceasefire.

Democratic lawmakers plan to seek to pass the war powers resolution introduced by New York representative Greg Meeks via unanimous consent later this morning, when the House of Representatives meets for a pro forma session. There is a press conference scheduled for after.

In a statement on today’s push, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said: “House Republican leadership remains completely silent on the president’s unhinged behavior. Instead, they continue to enable and excuse his dangerous conduct. We will continue to unleash maximum pressure on Republicans to put patriotic duty over party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping the madness.”

Representative Glenn Ivey, of Maryland, will lead the effort, and will invite all members who are in Washington today to join. However, 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 recent months, several war powers resolutions have failed in Congress after a handful of Democrats voted alongside Republicans. But Trump’s aggressive overtures this week – including a Truth Social post that said “a whole civilization” could be wiped out if Iran did not agree to demands, have pushed some to act.

“We need a permanent end to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice,” said Jeffries on CNN shortly after Trump announced the two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday.

“House Democrats have demanded that Speaker Mike Johnson immediately reconvene the House back into session so we can move a war powers resolution that will end this conflict permanently.”

Read the full story here:

In other developments:

• 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.

• 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.