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

• The two Democrats running for their party’s nomination to represent Michigan in the US Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official , and Haley Stevens, a congresswoman, clashed in a debate before next week’s primary.

• As Donald Trump tried to shore up support for his party ahead of the looming midterms, his speech in Michigan was disrupted by protesters angry about his promotion of data centers and his reluctance to release all of the files on the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender Trump socialized with for at least 17 years.

• The Trump administration has asked the US supreme court to allow implementation nationwide of his executive order aimed at tightening rules ⁠for mail-in voting ahead of the ⁠November midterm elections that ​will decide control of Congress.

• The US Senate voted ⁠51 to 43 on Monday to advance the nomination of Walter “Jay” Clayton to serve as the next director of national intelligence.

The Michigan Senate debate, which raced by at lightening speed, closes with this question from the moderator: “We have 30 seconds left for each of you to answer the following question: what makes you think you’re the formidable candidate who can take on Mike Rogers?”

“Poll after poll after poll,” El-Sayed begins, “has shown, despite what my colleague says, that I am the most competitive candidate to take on Mike Rogers.”

“But it’s also this that you’ve got to have something you’re fighting for,” he continues. “Ask yourself, if DTE funds both Mike Rogers and Haley Stevens, who wins?” El-Sayed asks, referencing donations from Detroit-based DTE Energy which provides power to Southeast Michigan customers. “DTE wins and Blue Cross and Big Pharma and Big Tech and Aipac: all funded by the same people,” he answers.

“We need a choice. I’m the only candidate in this race who does not take corporate money. And so I offer a real contrast to a guy who has never seen a corporate dollar he did not want,” El-Sayed concludes.

“Well, look,” Stevens says. “Governor Whitmer, attorney general Nessel, the chair of the Michigan legislative Black caucus, Amos O’Neill, they all agree that I will be Michigan’s workhorse, that I will stand up for us on day one, that I will beat Mike Rogers, just like I have beat Republicans four times over.”

With that, the debate ends, a week before Democratic primary voters pick one of the two to try to hold the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic senator Gary Peters. Democrats know that they need to retain the seat to have any realistic chance of regaining control of the Senate in November.

“Anybody who knows me, knows that getting people health care is the passion of my life,” El-Sayed says, when asked about his main goal in seeking office. “I went to medical school only to realize that too often our health care system is part of the problem.”

“We need and deserve guaranteed health care through Medicare for All,” he continues. “I have been thinking about this question. In fact, I’ve testified to the US Senate twice.”

“Now on Medicare for All, there is work that we’re going to have to do,” he adds. “We’re going to have to get a president elected who can do it in 2029. Now, in the process, though, I actually think that we could eliminate all the medical debt in this country, $225b.”

“Complaints and slogans aren’t solutions,” Haley Stevens says in an extended discussion of which candidate’s approach to stopping the abuses of ICE is more effective.

“I went up to an ICE detention facility to call out and see why people were losing their lives, why they were being held for long periods of time without due process. This has been an outrage,” Stevens says.

“Look, a lot of you remember Abdul from when he first ran for governor in 2018,” she continues, turning back to her frame that her opponent is more experienced as an influencer than a lawmaker. “It didn’t work out, so he started the podcast, he wrote the books, and now he’s running for Senate and he’s already bought the website for president. You know, it’s just another rung on the ladder.”

“That’s not what this job is for me,” Stevens adds. “That’s not why I’m putting up my hand in this moment. It’s not about celebrity. This is about making sure that Mike Rogers doesn’t get anywhere close to this seat. I’m the only one on this stage who has beat MAGA four times”.

“Like I told all the viewers at the outset that while my opponent was going to make this about me and her, I want to make this about you somehow,” El-Sayed counters. “Congresswoman, if you enjoy podcasts about public health, I welcome you to take a listen. You seem very concerned about that. I’m more concerned about the fact that people can’t pay for their gas. They can’t pay for their groceries. We’re fighting a war that’s cost us billions of dollars, that has been pushed by the the government of a foreign country, the same foreign country that the folks paying for your ads want us to send billions of dollars to.”

In response to a question about ICE, Stevens damns El-Sayed with faint praise, saying:

“I am standing up to Trump right now on these abuses of power, not shouting into a bullhorn, not getting in front of the first camera I see, but doing the hard work. That is what Michigan deserves. Look my my opponent here, Abdul, he is such a talented guy. He’s written three books. He did 300 podcasts. You know, he’s had all this attention. But the deal is, is we don’t need a celebrity candidate. We don’t need a celebrity senator. We need somebody who is committed to six years of hard, unglamorous work”.

Stevens goes on to argue that she has worked in Congress to rein in the immigration enforcement agency, casting El-Sayed and his call to abolish ICE as a protester rather than a doer.

“When it comes to the question of immigration,” El-Sayed responds, “we need Democrats who are going to stand up and actually talk about the great good that immigration has done for our country in the first place, the idea that somehow we can’t say ‘Abolish ICE’ because we’re so afraid of what they’re going to say when we’ve seen ICE terrorize people in our streets, to me, is exactly the kind of cowardice that we don’t need from Democrats. So, yeah, I’m going to take the bullhorn, and I’m going to say that I think we need to abolish ICE, because I am not afraid of what they’re going to say about me”.

As the debate enters a second phase, Haley Stevens is asked whether she is hurt by the fact that the powerful United Auto Workers endorsed El-Sayed, not her.

In her answer, Stevens agains pivots back to her claim that the Republican nominee fo the Michigan Senate seat, Mike Rogers, would rather run against El-Sayed. In fact, Stevens has repeated the name Mike Rogers again and again in many of her answers, to promote her case that she is the more electable Democrat.

El-Sayed counters that the attack ads against him are a sign that supporters of Stevens think she needs help to get elected.

“When you ask $60m to come into a race for you and then say that somehow you’re electable, I think you don’t quite understand what electability means,” El-Sayed said. “If you need a $60 million crutch, you probably can’t be elected on your own terms. So I would just say that you should probably, if you really want to beat Mike Rogers, find the candidate who is electable without having to ask for a $60 million crutch to do it.”

El-Sayed also argues that he wants to eliminate the power of money in US politics and says that he supports removing the filibuster from the Senate to make change.

Asked about whether he would call himself a progressive or a democratic socialist, El-Sayed replies:

I’m a doctor and a scientist. I want policy solutions that actually map to the problems that we face.

My governing experience is rebuilding a health department in the city of Detroit, leading Wayne County Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services. We had to go in there and work with a diverse community to be asking, what are the challenges we face and how do we actually solve them? We were able to identify the fact that our county ranked number eight for medical debt and nationwide, and we could eliminate that for a penny on the dollar. So we set aside $7 million to race up to $700 million in medical debt. When kids couldn’t get glasses, 30% of them would get tested positive for needing glasses and wouldn’t get a pair. We put optometrists on vans outside of school so that as soon as a kid got a positive test, they go out and get a full optometric exam and get a pair of glasses delivered within two weeks of a vision test.

Now, working with a diverse community of people, you come to realize that not every solution fits the same way. You’ve got to be thinking about a solution in the right way. When it comes to the question of socialism, I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. The biggest threat to capitalism was never the idea of government regulation. It was always monopoly.

In a very fast-paced debate, the moderator just asked Abdul El-Sayed to explain who he was talking about in leaked audio when he referenced the need to put the head of an “ogre” on a spike.

“Earlier this week, we heard that there was some kind of a Zoom call in which you would reference an opponent as ogre on a pike, and so many people took offense to that,” the moderator Roop Raj began. “Do you regret any of the comments that you’ve made?”

“Look, I took to Twitter last week and said that the tone in which people talk about my opponent is unkind, and I asked anybody who supported me to not talk about her that way,” El-Sayed replied.

“I was referring to a guy named John Fetterman, who’s a senator from Pennsylvania who has done terrible things, got elected on a set of values, and is now completely throwing those values in the mud,” he added. “And I do think it’s important for any senator in Michigan to have a relationship with folks who are in the US Senate, and if those folks are not actually acting in accordance with what they got elected on, I think it’s important for all of us to have an honest opinion about what we’re going to do to make sure that our Senate looks like the people it represents.”

“Thank you for clarifying that you didn’t call me an ogre,” Stevens said.

The debate in the Michigan Senate race has turned to the question of the $46m spent by Aipac, the pro-Israel lobby, to support Stevens, and the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Michigan voters.

Stevens said that she supports a two-state solution, which the veteran peace negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have recently described as a dangerous myth in a new book about the failure of the framework that has not moved the region closer to peace.

El-Sayed stresses that he does not want Michigan taxpayers’ money to be sent to a foreign government.

The final televised debate between the two Democrats running for their party’s nomination for the US Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official who is backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Haley Stevens, a congresswoman backed by Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, is underway.

The debate is being live-streamed and we will bring you updates as the hour-long event unfolds.

In the first exchanges, El-Sayed referenced his opposition to military aid to Israel and the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) for his opponent. Stevens called herself the more electable candidate and accused the progressive populist of running for celebrity rather than results.

Donald Trump just arrived back in the White House from his trip to Michigan for what was effectively a campaign rally for Republican candidates ahead of the primary elections there next week.

As the president tried to shore up support for his party ahead of the looming midterms, his speech was disrupted by protesters angry about two aspects of Trump’s second term: his promotion of data centers to power an AI transformation many Americans oppose and his reluctance to release all of the files from the federal investigations into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender Trump socialized with for at least 17 years.

Early in Trump’s speech, a group of protesters in the crowd held up banners that read “Stop Data Centers”, and chanted against the power-hungry AI facilities before being bundled away. Trump was speaking in Michigan’s seventh congressional district where one of the Democrats running for Congress, the Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence, is promising to back a moratorium on data centers.

Another lone protester interrupted the president’s remarks with a reference to the Epstein files, loudly shouting “pedophile protector” at Trump, again and again.

Donald Trump wrapped up remarks at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan a short time ago with a pair of lies he has repeated many, many times.

The first was his claim that “mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt” and the only reason for anyone to oppose his drive to require proof of citizenship to register to vote, and photo ID to cast a ballot, is that his opponents want to cheat.

“We want voter photo ID. And we want all voters showing proof of a thing called citizenship,” Trump said late in his speech. “You read recently in New Jersey, where tremendous numbers of people were found out that they were on the voter rolls totally illegally, and that’s all over the country,” he added, mischaracterizing the scale of a computer glitch in New Jersey’s automatic voter registration system for licensed drivers that mistakenly registered about 6,600 people who identified themselves as non-US citizens.

According to the state’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, who last week revealed the software error that was corrected before the 2024 election, “fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted,” and they were registered as Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

“While administrative errors such as New Jersey’s do infrequently occur, they are very rare and affect a very small fraction of voters, David Becker, a voting rights expert who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research said. “In this case, the number of wrongful registrations represents a miniscule fraction, roughly 0.1%, of New Jersey’s total active voter registration records in 2024.”

The president went on to claim that even he had been asked for ID when he voted at some unspecified time in the past. “Even me, I went to vote. ‘Sir, may I please see your identification? Sir, I’m so embarrassed; I know you’re Trump. Please. Do you have some identification? I don’t want to lose my job.’ I whipped out- I was lucky I had some kind of a card on me, I didn’t even know, but I gave it.”

Trump did not say when this exchange took place, but he reportedly voted by mail himself earlier this year in a March special election in Florida even though he was in Palm Beach on the day the ballot was requested and returned.

Trump did vote in person in Palm Beach in the 2024 and 2020 general elections, but his fuzzy memory about what sort of “a card” he provided as ID when asked at the polls suggests that it could have been a debit card, which was a sort of non-photo ID acceptable at the time to vote, along with other cards, like student IDs or retirement center IDs, that Florida poll workers could accept before the state’s law changed this year. Under the new law none of those forms of ID will be accepted any longer, requiring voters to produce a new form of drivers’ license that confirms citizenship, or a passport or a birth certificate along with another form of photo ID.

While Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on voting rights advocates who oppose proof of citizenship and photo ID to register and cast ballots, a 2023 survey by the Brennan Center suggested that “more than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don’t have proof of citizenship readily available”, meaning a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers. “And at least 3.8 million don’t have these documents at all, often because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.”

The Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland reported in 2024 that nearly 21 million voting-age US citizens “do not have a current (non-expired) driver’s license” and another 28.6 million have a non-expired license, but it does not have both their current address and current name.

Before leaving Michigan, Trump also repeated a tale he has been telling for a decade, despite the fact that it is not true: that he was named Michigan’s Man of the Year before he ran for president.

“I was here 25 years ago. I got Man of the Year,” Trump said, as he has claimed in the past during visits to the state as president. “The press questioned that and then they found out it was true, actually,” he added, falsely.

As CNN’s tireless fact-checker Daniel Dale reported in 2024, the origin of Trump’s claim appears to be that he was invited to speak at a Republican event in the state in 2013, where, according to a former Republican congressman who was there, Trump was presented with a framed copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Years later, when Trump started claiming he had been given a Michigan Man of the Year award, the congressman told CNN that was untrue. But a local Republican group tied to make it seem true in 2023, by naming Trump the state’s Man of the Decade.

The Trump administration has asked the US supreme court to allow implementation nationwide of his executive order aimed at tightening rules ⁠for mail-in voting ahead of the ⁠November midterm elections that ​will decide control of Congress.

In a filing, the justice department requested that the justices put on hold a judge’s ruling preventing the enforcement of the president’s directive in 23 mostly Democratic-governed ⁠states and Washington DC, which had challenged the order as unconstitutional, while the litigation plays out.

Last month, US district judge Indira ⁠Talwani ruled that the provisions of an executive order issued by Donald Trump on 31 March requiring the postal service to require the use of a barcode tracking system for ballot envelopes tied to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data was unconstitutional.

It comes amid Trump’s wider drive to reshape rules and regulations around voting ahead of the midterms. Trump is pushing Congress to pass the Save America Act, which would impose new ID requirements on voters and curtail mail-in voting, which he has long railed against alleging widespread fraud – despite never producing any evidence of this and despite the fact the he has voted by mail himself.

Former FBI director James Comey urged a judge today to throw out federal charges against him, arguing that a photo of seashells arranged on a beach he posted on social media was not a call to violence against Donald Trump but protected political speech.

Comey’s lawyers argue the government cannot prove the photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47” constituted a “true threat” against the president, who fired Comey in 2017 and has publicly called for his prosecution. The slogan has long meant to “get rid of” or “eject”, and Trump is the 47th president.

The justice department previously tried and failed to bring a separate case against Comey. After that federal prosecutors focused on the 2025 social media post featuring the seashells spelling out “86 47”. Comeuy captioned the post: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

“But the government now singles out Mr Comey to prosecute one of the President’s most prominent critics for publishing another person’s statement of political opposition,” his attorney’s wrote. “That attempt to suppress core political speech contravenes both the statutes at issue and the First Amendment.”

Comey’s attorneys argued that to be a “true threat” under the law, his post would have needed to communicate a “serious expression” that he was going to commit violence.

“No reasonable observer who was aware of the relevant context would read the phrase ‘86 47’ to connote violence against the President,” Comey’s attorneys wrote. “But even if ‘86 47’ could implausibly be read to suggest violence, a reasonable observer would still understand Mr Comey’s post as mere political hyperbole, not a true threat.”

The justice department has not elaborated on any evidence of intent the government has. The case is due to go to trial in October.

Asked by a reporter if he is frustrated with Pete Hegseth’s advice on Iran early on in the war, Trump expressed confidence in his defense secretary and said he thinks his Hegseth “has done a great job”.

Trump has said that Hegseth and others led him to believe that Iran was actively preparing to attack the United States if Washington did not strike first. They advised him that the situation with Iran was rapidly approaching “a point of no return” and advocated for pre-emptive military action.

Trump also claimed to reporters on Air Force One that Iran requested a meeting “through their surrogates and directly”.

They want to meet, and we’re meeting. Without what we did, they wouldn’t even be talking to us … They would not have requested the meeting if we were doing poorly. The only reason they want to meet is because we’ve been hitting them very hard.

During a gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One earlier, Donald Trump dismissed concerns that US ammunition stockpiles are running low after five months of bombing Iran.

“We’re building that up,” he said. “But we have a lot. We have a lot of the mid-level stuff, too. I mean, more than we could ever use no matter what. But we have a lot. I’d like to have more, to be honest, but so much was given to Ukraine by Biden.”

GOP senator Mitch McConnell’s office has released a health update saying he is still not ready to return to in-person work in the Capitol following his hospitalization on 14 June after a fall.

“I’m still working hard to get back to my full schedule of work in the Senate and in Kentucky, keeping up with intense physical therapy per my doctors’ orders,” McConnell, 84, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, that means I won’t be able to make it to Fancy Farm, Kentucky this Saturday.”

A note from the office of the attending physician added: “Senator McConnell continues his recovery from a fall at home in June. OAP physicians visit with the Senator every day, discussing all aspects of his rehabilitation care. Since his discharge from hospital care, he has maintained a strenuous course of physical therapy and rehabilitation, including multiple sessions a day designed to rebuild strength and reduce the risk of future falls. His bout with childhood polio continues to be a significant factor in his mobility. He is not yet medically cleared to leave the rehab facility and return to the office.”

Donald Trump said ⁠today that ⁠he had paused US strikes on Iran to give diplomacy another chance, but he ​was ‌ready ‌for “strong military ‌action” if diplomacy fails.

Washington was in “very deep ⁠talks with Iran”, the president told Axios, but, he added: “If they don’t work out, we will be go back to very strong military action.”

He said that he paused US attacks on Friday because the countries acting as mediators to bring an end to the conflict asked him to. “All of the people that deal with Iran asked me: ‘Don’t fire,’” he said.

Asked how long he was willing to give diplomacy, he said, “Not much time. Either it goes fast or not at all.”

Top military officials advised Trump to halt his bombing campaign, Axios reported on Sunday. Adm Bradley Cooper, the top US military commander in the region, had told Trump the US military campaign had reached the limits of its effectiveness.

The message was said to affect Trump’s decision to hold strikes on Iran for the first time in nearly two weeks. Cooper told Trump the US had nearly exhausted the list of targets that it had developed to attack in Iran, and without a return to major combat operations there was little point in continuing the bombing campaign, Axios reported.

Senior officials in the Trump administration are reported to have also told the president about dwindling munitions stockpiles that could hamper a sustained military campaign in the region.

The current negotiations are focused on a new deal that would reopen the strait of Hormuz and relaunch talks on a comprehensive nuclear deal, according to Axios.

The talks are being conducted mainly between Iran and Oman, but Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt and Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are also actively involved.

On his meeting tomorrow with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump added:

I am going to talk to Bibi about the fact that if I weren’t president, Iran would have had nuclear weapons by now and Israel would have been destroyed.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are set to arrive in Washington simultaneously with the goal of winning the ear of Donald Trump at pivotal moments in wars affecting their respective countries.

Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, will attend Tuesday’s funeral of Lindsey Graham, the former Republican senator for South Carolina, who died suddenly on 11 July and was a close ally of both leaders.

Both men are scheduled to meet with Trump at a time when US policy towards the wars in Iran and Ukraine is in a state of flux.

The meeting between Trump and Netanyahu will be the first between the two leaders since February, when they were in lockstep preparing for strikes against Iran that began on 28 February.

Since then, tensions between the pair have risen as the war has drifted inconclusively, with Trump calling the Israeli premier “crazy” and declaring:

Without me, there would be no Israel.

Fueling the tensions between the pair is continuing uncertainty over Trump’s zigzagging approach to the regime in Tehran, which he once openly supported toppling – in line with the stance of Netanyahu, who has long plotted its overthrow.

Netanyahu is not believed to have been consulted on the US-Iran memorandum of understanding that was meant to institute a 60-day ceasefire in the conflict, which some analysts say took little account of Israel’s interests.

Netanyahu is also believed to be unhappy over a deal announced last week between the US and Saudi Arabia allowing for a civil Saudi nuclear program.

Zelenskyy’s presence is equally significant as it coincides with signs of a dramatic change of Trump administration posture in Ukraine’s war with Russia – with the White House appearing more supportive of Kyiv’s position than at any time since Trump’s return to office.

The rightwing social media influencer Laura Loomer gave the latest signal of a sea change in Washington’s position when she met Zelenskyy in the Ukrainian capital last week, before publicly recanting her previous support for Russia.

Zelenskyy posted on social media at the weekend that he had instructed Ukraine’s intelligence services to share information on Russia’s support for Iran in the conflict with the US. He wrote on X that Ukraine had recorded Russian satellite surveillance of US military facilities in the Gulf, and that of Washington’s allies in the region.

Trump has again called on Senate Republicans to abandon the filibuster to pursue his legislative agenda.

“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to “leave town” until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of, including a full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT, the Budget, and the ever looming Debt Ceiling disaster, 1929!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “The Dumocrats will do it on day one, and can’t believe how lucky they got with this Senate leadership. Remember, stupidity always brings LOSING & DEATH!”

The Senate majority leader of South Dakota, has adamantly refused Trump’s demands to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for passage of non-budgetary legislation.

Trump also called out Thune at an appearance in Marietta, Georgia, on Thursday. He said:

Everybody call John Thune at the Senate. He’s the leader of the Republican Party. And tell them to get this stuff approved,” Trump said to supporters at Wheeler high school. “So we’re fighting so that all voters must show voter ID. We’re fighting so that all voters must provide proof of citizenship, OK? And also the no mail-in ballots, very important … They got to really terminate the filibuster, get everything approved right away, because you’re going to have a stoppage. You’re going to have a stoppage in September.

President Donald Trump will visit General Motors at the Milford Proving Ground in suburban Detroit on Monday afternoon in defense of new, sweeping tariffs on Canada and his economic agenda ahead of primary contests next week.

Trump argues that tax cuts and tariffs protected 170,000 jobs in Michigan, crediting tariffs as the catalyst. “The President pledged to put Michigan workers back to work, and he’s doing it,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement.

Michigan Democrats counter that the state’s residents have had to pay more than $2bn more for gasoline since Trump took office.

Trump announced a new round of tariffs on Canada on 20 July. The 50% tariff on imports ranging from wine to hockey sticks to cement begins in late August.

The Gordie Howe Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Canada also opens today. It is unclear if Trump will visit the bridge, which has become another lightning rod for conflict between the US and Canada. A ribbon-cutting ceremony in Windsor was a Canada-only event after rescinding invitations following the tariff announcement.

Trump supported the bridge project during his first term, but has attacked it since retaking office, claiming that the terms of the bridge agreement are being renegotiated. “We changed the terms of the Deal so that the United States of America now gets 50% of the Profit,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

What that actually means in practice is unclear. Canada paid for the bridge construction.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

The Senate is due to begin voting as early as Monday on the nomination of Manhattan US attorney Jay Clayton, Donald Trump’s pick to be the ⁠top US spy, and he ⁠is expected to ​be approved within days despite a tense confirmation hearing.

If approved to be the director of national intelligence, Clayton would fill a role vacated in June when Tulsi Gabbard stepped down after ⁠a tenure marked by clashes with congressional Democrats, who accused her of advancing Trump’s political agenda and promoting debunked election claims.

The Senate is due to hold a procedural vote Monday evening on whether to advance ⁠Clayton’s nomination for the job overseeing the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, Reuters reported.

The position of DNI was created after the 11 September 2001 attacks to ​coordinate the country’s sprawling intelligence apparatus.

Many senators are ‌eager for Clayton to take up ‌the post because they are unhappy with the interim director of national intelligence, Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist ‌without national security experience who has been cutting staff at the agency.

If Clayton wins a majority in the 100-member Senate on the procedural vote, a final confirmation vote is expected later in the week.

Trump’s Republicans, who have a 53-47 majority in the chamber and rarely break from the White House, are expected to provide Clayton with enough votes for confirmation.

In other developments:

• The Pentagon updated its official war casualty database over the weekend, adding more than 140 wounded service members. The Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) also introduced a new casualty category labeled “Overseas Operations” for personnel killed and wounded “starting July 7”. According to the updated database, the official toll for the earlier phase of the US-Iran war, known as Operation Epic Fury, now stands at 14 service members killed and more than 400 wounded in action.

• Donald Trump’s Republican party has “nothing to run on” for the congressional midterm elections after the president broke promises to lower costs and avoid starting war overseas, Hakeem Jeffries has said. The House minority leader, a New York congressman, made those comments on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, exactly 100 days from the 3 November midterms, when Jeffries and his fellow Democrats are aiming to take control of the US House and Senate from their Republican opponents.

• Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, is “fomenting hate” by calling the Israeli prime minister a war criminal who should be arrested over Israel’s war in Gaza if he visits the city for the United Nations general assembly.

• Tom Homan, the Trump administration “border czar”, on Sunday said he did not believe the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer at the center of a recent fatal shooting in Maine “should have ever cleared vetting”. Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Homan was asked by host Dana Bash about the officer’s eligibility to serve following reports that two of his ex-wives had accused him of abuse.

• Pop star Katy Perry has condemned the Trump White House after it used her hit song Firework in a TikTok video showing US military strikes on Iranian targets, saying she never approved the use of her music. The White House video, which featured Firework playing over footage of a missile striking an Iranian naval ship, has amassed more than 6 million views. The post was captioned: “Iran has been warned.”

• New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill recently signed a new law prohibiting businesses from using shoppers’ personal information to charge different prices for identical products, making her state the third in the US to ban the practice. The Fair Price Protection Act passed by New Jersey’s legislature seeks to protect consumers from surveillance pricing, in which retailers can use data including online activity, location and purchasing history to arbitrarily change prices for individual shoppers.