This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but the Guardian’s round-the-clock coverage of the crisis in the Middle East continues. Here are the latest developments in US politics:

• 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.

• Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats would force a vote on a war powers resolution to limit the administration’s military campaign in Iran when Congress returns from recess next week.

• 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.

Donald Trump’s last-minute decision this week to put off his threatened strikes on Iranian infrastructure led to a raft of jokes on social media based on what the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong calls his “Taco theory”, the principle that the president’s pattern of bluster and retreat on a host of issues from tariffs to war can usually be described this way: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

But as the clock ticked ever closer to Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for what he insisted would be an end to Iranian civilization, that Taco acronym caused a lot of confusion in Japan, because the term sounds exactly like the Japanese word for octopus, tako.

To clear up that confusion, Japan’s Fuji News Network devoted an entire segment to helping viewers understand the origins of the term, and how it might be used to predict the volatile president’s behavior.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator who sits on the Senate foreign relations committee, called on Israel to stop the intense and deadly bombing of Lebanon, which intensified on Wednesday, in apparent violation of a Pakistani-brokered ceasefire.

“Israel must stop these attacks,” Murphy wrote on X in response to video of the Israeli bombing of Beirut. “No matter how incompetently negotiated this ceasefire was, we should all want it hold. But that means all parties to this regional war – the U.S., Iran, Israel, and Iran’s proxies – must stand down.”

Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announced on the same social media platform early on Wednesday: “I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”

Donald Trump, who announced with some fanfare last year that he was doubling tariffs on imported steel to 50% during a rally at a US Steel plant outside Pittsburgh, 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 on Wednesday.

ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based steel-maker, is providing steel for the structure, two unnamed sources told the Times. The sources said the steel was produced in Europe.

The White House has not disclosed details of the donation, but Trump said last October that he had been offered a donation of steel for the ballroom valued at $37m.

After an unusual private meeting at the White House on Wednesday 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.

Trump, who normally revels in conducting public meetings with visiting dignitaries on television, initially made no statement on what was discussed with Rutte, but after the former Dutch prime minister who leads the military alliance went on CNN to cast the talk as a “frank and open” discussion “between friends”, the president issued a blistering, all-caps social media post aimed at further unsettling Nato.

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” the president wrote in a manner that did little to dispel concerns that he might try to withdraw from the military alliance.

Rutte, who has drawn criticism in Europe for seeming to endorse Trump’s decision to launch a war of choice against Iran without consulting Nato allies, and then scolding them for not helping to deal with its consequences, told CNN that “some” Nato members had failed in their response to Trump’s angry demand that they take part in the war on Iran by forcing open the strait of Hormuz.

After no Nato country responded to Trump’s demand for help, he announced that the US did not want or need any such help.

“I really admire his leadership,” Rutte also said of Trump, while refusing to say whether he left the meeting reassured that the US would remain in Nato, or alarmed that Trump might try to withdraw from it.

Asked if he believed Nato countries were tested and failed, Rutte said: “Some of them yes, but a large majority of European countries, and that’s what we discussed today, have done what they promised before in a case like this.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that withdrawing from Nato is something the president “has discussed” and would likely raise with the secretary general.

Before his meeting with Trump, a jovial Rutte posed with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, at the state department.

While Trump has spoken as if he has the power to pull the US out of Nato, a 2023 law, co-sponsored by then-senator Rubio, requires Senate approval, or an act of Congress before a president can suspend, terminate or withdraw US membership in Nato.

At the time, Rubio said the law would “ensure that current and future US presidents cannot leave Nato without rigorous debate and consideration by the US Congress with the input of the American people”.

Seth Harp, a journalist who based parts of his book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, on interviews with Courtney Williams, an army veteran who worked with US special forces, condemned the Trump administration’s arrest of Williams on Wednesday on social media.

“The FBI is incapable of solving real crimes, like all the murders on Fort Bragg involving elite soldiers trafficking drugs, so they settle for retaliating against courageous whistleblowers like Courtney Williams, whose only ‘crime’ was telling the truth about Delta Force,” Harp just wrote in response to an X post from Kash Patel, the FBI director, about the arrest.

“Typical low-quality lawyering from Trump’s DOJ,” Harp wrote in another post, which showed a page from the criminal complaint against Williams filed on Wednesday in federal court in North Carolina which referenced him arranging for his source to mail him a computer drive.

“The jump drive ‘likely contained classified NDI’?” the journalist wrote in reference to the assumption by prosecutors that the drive had secret national defense information on it. “That’s the standard for indicting someone?”

“News flash,” he added, “the drive contained an incredibly boring and tedious 100% public EEOC complaint THAT WAS TOO BIG TO SEND VIA EMAIL”.

The US justice department announced on Wednesday that the FBI has arrested Courtney Williams, a military veteran who later worked in support of Delta Force, a covert US commando unit, after she was indicted for her “alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist”.

The criminal complaint against Williams, filed in federal court in North Carolina, details communication between Williams and a journalist who is not named, but, as the legal journalist Chris Geidner notes, the reporter Seth Harp wrote about Williams in his book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, and in an excerpt from the book published by Politico last year.

According to complaint, investigators found that someone using Williams’s phone had spoken with a journalist for nearly five hours, and “exchanged approximately 180 text messages with the Journalist between 2022 and 2025”.

Harp provided the following statement on the charging of Williams to WRAL, a North Carolina news station:

“Courtney Williams is a brave whistleblower and truth-teller. Former Delta Force operators disclose ‘national defense information’ on podcasts and YouTube shows every day, but the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit. This is a vindictive act of retaliation, plain and simple.”

The arrest was celebrated on social media by the FBI director, Kash Patel.

“Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: we’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests,” Patel wrote. “This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way.”

Speaking to reporters in Hungary on Wednesday, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed not to recognize the name of the Vatican ambassador to the United States when he was asked about reports that a Pentagon official had reprimanded the Catholic diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, over the American-born pope’s opposition to US militarism.

Vance, whose new book is about his conversion to Catholicism, then acknowledged that he had met the cardinal, who has represented the church in Washington DC since 2016, and hosted a prayer breakfast that Vance spoke at last year, but the vice-president suggested that he had no idea if the reporting, that a senior Pentagon official, Elbridge Colby, had indeed summoned the cardinal in January.

According to reporting from the conservative Free Press, confirmed on Wednesday by the newsletter Letters From Leo, Colby and his aides were enraged by Pope Leo’s January declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

“America,” Colby and his colleagues reportedly told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

According to Letters From Leo, “some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.”

As close observers of Vance’s career have pointed out, it was hard to believe that he had not heard about the reported meeting before being asked about it, given the central role Catholicism plays in his public persona, and the fact that he personally introduced his friend Colby at the Pentagon official’s Senate confirmation hearing last year.

Colby, also a Catholic, is the grandson of William Colby, a devout Catholic who served as CIA director for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. William Colby’s daughters celebrated their first communions at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome while he was posted there for the CIA during the 1950s.

The journalist Seymour Hersh said in a 2011 documentary by Carl Colby, one of the CIA director’s sons, that the late CIA director had been a source for Hersh’s reporting in the 1970s that revealed illegal domestic spying by the CIA.

Before Donald Trump stepped into his meeting with Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, 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 close ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Trump, whose pre-presidential career was animated by similar social-media spats with celebrities, gloated on his own platform over the success of his hand-picked candidate to replace Greene in Congress.

“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. “Congratulations to Clay Fuller, a very large improvement over his deranged predecessor!” the president added.

Trump also noted that he had won the heavily Republican district by almost 37 points in the 2024 presidential election, but that only served to underscore the size of the swing to the Democrats, whose candidate in Tuesday’s special election, came within 12 points of the Trump-endorsed Republican, Clay Fuller.

As voters went to the polls on Tuesday, Greene had replied to Trump’s threat to erase Iranian civilization by calling on the cabinet and Congress to remove the president through the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness,” the recently resigned congresswoman wrote on X.

Greene’s replacement, Fuller, is a former judge advocate general in the US air force, who joins Congress in the wake of the president’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, which is a clear war crime according to many of his former colleagues.

Minutes after Trump’s post on Wednesday, Greene responded by pointing out that, despite Trump’s boast about the value of his endorsement of Fuller, her former district “was never in danger of flipping” to the Democrats, and noted that while she had defeated the Democratic candidate Shawn Harris by nearly 29 points in 2024, Fuller only beat Harris on Tuesday by less than 12 points.

“Trump flipping MAGA from America First to America Last, covering up for the Epstein files, and betraying key campaign promises of no more foreign wars has been the best help for the Democrats,” Greene wrote. “Sad!”

During today’s press briefing, Karoline Leavitt defended the president’s comments on Truth Social that a “whole civilization” would die if a deal with Iran was not reached.

“[Trump’s] very tough rhetoric and his tough negotiating style is what has led to the result that you are all witnessing today,” Leavitt said. “It was the Iranians who backed down, not President Trump.”

The press secretary went on to say that Trump “absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime”.

The press secretary chided the press for allegedly “misreporting” that Donald Trump is working from the original 10-point plan put forward by Tehran.

“It was literally thrown in the garbage by President Trump and his negotiating team,” she said, despite the fact that Trump said on Truth Social that the US received a 10-point proposal from Iran that is believed to be a “workable basis on which to negotiate”.

Leavitt claimed that Iran actually put forward a “more reasonable and entirely different and condensed plan to the president”.

She noted that Trump’s red lines, namely the end of uranium enrichment in Iran, “have not changed”.

“The idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wishlist,” she says, “is completely absurd.”

After Trump announced the ceasefire, Iranian state media published a proposal that included continued Iranian control over the strategic strait of Hormuz, an end to international sanctions on the country and “acceptance” of uranium enrichment.

However, on Wednesday, the president implied that the ceasefire was based on an entirely different proposal from the US, claiming that “there is only one group of meaningful ‘POINTS’ that are acceptable to the United States, and we will be discussing them behind closed doors during these Negotiations,” in a post on Truth Social.

In a press conference in New York today, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats in the upper chamber would force a vote on a war powers resolution to limit the administration’s military campaign in Iran when Congress returns from recess next week.

Earlier, the Senate’s top Democrat called Donald Trump a “military moron” on social media.

Schumer noted that, despite the two-week ceasefire, the cost of the war, and the effect on gas prices, has made the US “worse off today than we were when [Trump] started it”.

“If he restarts this war we will be in even worse shape. We must pass our War Powers Resolution to end this war for good,” Schumer wrote.

A growing number of Democrats are calling for the 25th amendment to be invoked to remove Donald Trump from office, following the president’s genuinely shocking post yesterday morning in which he threatened to wipe out an entire civilization if Iran didn’t capitulate to his demands.

The extraordinary, violent outburst has raised questions about the president’s mental health, as well as spurring grave concerns about whether he would follow through on his threats to bomb Iran’s critical infrastructure – which would amount to war crimes under international law.

More than 70 lawmakers – mostly in the House but also a handful in the Senate – have made the demand. Some have called for his cabinet to invoke the amendment to declare him unfit for office, others have called for his impeachment and conviction – and some have called for both.

Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, told CNN on Tuesday that “no president in control of his senses would publicly promise to eradicate an entire civilization”.

That’s why I agree with Republicans who have put the 25th amendment on the table. Trump seems to be taking us on a path to mass war crimes. That’s a path we cannot accept.

Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, wrote on X:

The House and Senate must return to session. The House must pass articles of impeachment, and then the Senate must vote to convict and remove the President. Or, the cabinet and Vice President, with congressional concurrence, must invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump.

“We need to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump,” representative Ro Khanna, of California, wrote on Tuesday morning on X. “Threatening war crimes is a blatant violation of our constitution and the Geneva Conventions.”

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on X:

Donald Trump’s instability is more clear and dangerous than ever. If the Cabinet is not willing to invoke the 25th Amendment and restore sanity, Republicans must reconvene the Congress to end this war.

Representative Pramila Jayapal also said on X after the ceasefire announcement:

I’m relieved Trump did not destroy an entire civilization last night, but his unhinged threat and illegal war make it clear he is unfit to serve as president.

Trump needs to be removed from office. And we must oppose his new $1.5 trillion budget proposal for more war.

Illinois’s governor, JB Pritzker, a potential future presidential hopeful, also called for the 25th amendment to be invoked. He said on X of Trump’s post:

This is not foreign policy, it’s a deranged mad man threatening to wipe out an entire country. It’s past time. The 25th Amendment must be invoked.

Trump’s threat outraged even those who formerly made up his core Maga base, including former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and rightwing commentators and conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Candace Owens.

“25TH AMENDMENT!!!” Greene, formerly a staunch Trump ally turned critic, posted on X yesterday. “Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”

A handful of Republican lawmakers also expressed unease with threats to strike civilian targets, but by and large the party has remained silent.

The House oversight committee has signaled it will continue to seek testimony from former attorney general Pam Bondi after she was ousted last week.

She was subpoenaed for a 14 April deposition on the justice department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, but the date was never confirmed by her. A committee spokesperson said in a statement that the panel would continue to pursue scheduling a date for her testimony.

The Department of Justice has stated Pam Bondi will not appear on April 14 for a deposition since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General. The Committee will contact Pam Bondi’s personal counsel to discuss next steps regarding scheduling her deposition.

Bondi was subpoenaed last month after five Republicans on the committee joined forces with Democrats to seek her testimony.

The top Democrat on the panel, Robert Garcia, said in a statement on Wednesday that Bondi was “trying to get out of her legal obligation to testify”.

Our bipartisan subpoena is to Pam Bondi, whether she is the Attorney General or not. She must come in to testify immediately, and if she defies the subpoena, we will begin contempt charges in Congress. The survivors deserve justices.

Under Lee Zeldin – the US environment secretary who spoke at the climate-skeptical Heartland Institute’s conference on Wednesday morning – the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.

“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” he said. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”

Zeldin spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding”.

Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but Heartland Institute has celebrated it; references to its rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington DC on Wednesday. Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.

He also criticized previous administrations for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet”.

There is scientific consensus that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said that the lower chamber should vote immediately on a war powers resolution to curb the Trump administration’s war on Iran.

“We need a permanent end to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice,” Jeffries told CNN shortly after Donald 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.”

A reminder that Democratic lawmakers led calls for Trump’s ouster after he threatened to wipe out an “entire civilization” if Iran did not reach a deal to reopen the strait of Hormuz. While Jeffries told CNN that the pause is “insufficient”, it’s not clear how this deal will ultimately affect Congress’s wider perception of Trump’s handling of the war. Republicans, including Johnson and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, were largely silent in the wake of Trump’s astonishing posts on social media in recent days.

When asked whether Donald Trump did, in fact, plan to follow through with his staggering threats that a “whole civilization will die” if Iran did not reopen the strait of Hormuz, Pete Hegseth said that had a target “set, locked and loaded” had a deal collapsed by Tuesday evening.

The defense secretary claimed that the Iranian regime had “dual use” for “infrastructure, bridges, power plants”, adding that they were used “to fund their military” and “to fund their terror campaign”.

A reminder, the administration came under wide-spread backlash on Tuesday after the president’s missive suggested that the US would violate the Geneva conventions to achieve its objective.

“We had a lot of legitimate targets. They knew exactly the scope of what we were capable of,” Hegseth said, defending Trump’s plans.

As the defense secretary continued to extol that the two-week ceasefire signals a decisive victory, he listed several Iranian officials who have been killed since the war began at the end of February.

“The new Iranian regime was out of options and out of time, so they cut a deal,” Hegseth said. “We control their fate, not the other way around. That’s why they came to the table. Iran’s defeat is America’s retribution for every American lost to Iranian terror.”

At his Penatagon press conference, Pete Hegseth begins by saying Iran “begged for this ceasefire” and says Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military.

He says the country’s missile programme has been “functionally destroyed” and that Iran’s navy “is at the bottom of the sea”. Hesgeth adds that “we [the US] own their skies”.

The US carried out 800 strikes on Tuesday night, he says, destroying Iran’s defence industrial base.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

Democratic-backed candidate Chris Taylor won election to the Wisconsin supreme court on Tuesday, giving liberals a 5-2 edge on the court.

She beat conservative Maria Lazar, consolidating the liberal hold on the high court ahead of the next presidential election, when the swing state is sure to see challenges to election results.

“Once again, Wisconsin showed the entire nation that we believe that the people should be at the center of government and the priority of our judiciary, not the billionaires, not the most powerful and privileged, but the people,” Taylor said in her victory speech.

Taylor’s win gives liberals a 5-2 bloc on the bench. Taylor is seen as friendly to voting rights, while Lazar’s views aligned more closely with Republicans, pushing for policies that could hinder voting access and impact. Lazar had continued to defend maps in Wisconsin that were gerrymandered to lead to more Republican victories, which have since been overturned.

Liberals are now guaranteed to hold a majority on the court until at least 2030. Wisconsin Republican party chair Brian Schimming, in the wake of Lazar’s double-digit defeat, called for Republicans to “stay united and continue fighting for our conservative values.”

The race is another gauge of Democrats’ durability in this year’s midterms, particularly in a closely watched swing state, though the November ticket and voter turnout will be much different than a court election.

Democratic candidates have recently won upset victories throughout the country in places typically held by Republicans, giving them momentum heading into November. Voters often side against the president in midterm elections.

Read the full story here:

In other developments:

• Shortly before his 8pm ET deadline for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz, or face the death of its “whole civilization”, Donald Trump posted on social media that the US had reached a temporary ceasefire agreement with Iran. Details of the agreement are still forthcoming and bombing continues across the region.

• Iranian officials will meet with the United States for talks beginning Friday. Pakistan, which brokered the ceasefire agreement, will host the negotiations in Islamabad.

• The Pentagon will hold a press briefing at 8am ET today. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are expected to attend.

• Some Democrats criticized the ceasefire deal, saying its terms, if true, would cede major concessions to Iran, including control over the strait of Hormuz. Others, including New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called for Congress to invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump from office after he “threatened a genocide against the Iranian people”.

• Several Republicans cheered the president’s decision, casting it as shrewd and tactical. “This is a strong first step toward holding Iran accountable,” said senator Rick Scott of Florida.

• Shelly Kittleson, the US journalist who was kidnapped in Baghdad by the Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah last week, has been released, said secretary of state Marco Rubio.

• Repulican Clay Fuller won Georgia’s special election to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House of Representatives. In line with special elections for Congress since the start of Trump’s term, his Democratic rival, Shawn Harris, overperformed.