Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
President Donald Trump will convene a cabinet meeting later today at his Camp David retreat as he grapples with how to resolve his war against Iran.
He will also be keen to find a way to bring down gasoline prices as the Republicans head into the November midterm elections.
This will be only his third trip to Camp David during his second term, with Trump largely having stayed away from the mountaintop presidential retreat in western Maryland.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a briefing last week that this would be the 13th Cabinet meeting of Trump’s second term and that it would be “a lot of fun and something different for the cabinet to experience together.”
The agenda for the meeting will likely focus heavily on foreign policy, Reuters reported. Trump is engaged in tit-for-tat strikes against Iranian targets with no end in sight to a conflict that the president initially projected would last just a few weeks but is now five months old.
The Iran war has sent gasoline prices spiraling and taken a toll on his popularity across the US. This week, a Reuters-Ipsos poll found just one in three Americans support the war, the lowest in the poll since the conflict’s early days.
In another foreign policy development, Trump on Thursday night announced that his so-called “Board of Peace” reached an agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas militants and other armed groups in Gaza. Israel has yet to respond officially to the plan.
In other developments:
- President Donald Trump has said he may pull Todd Blanche’snomination for attorney-general until senatorsJohn CornynandThom Tillisleave office. The Republicans have demanded written assurances about the settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. Cornyn recently lost the GOP primary in Texas and Tillis is not seeking reelection.
- The US Senate narrowly rejected a largely symbolic effort to check Donald Trump’s war in Iran, as a war powers resolution directing the president to end hostilities failed in a 49-50 vote.
- The House Democratic Women’s Caucus called on Thursday for an ethics committee investigation of Republican congressman Max Miller, a former Trump aide who has been accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife and former girlfriend.
- New polling commissioned by Fox News shows Texas Democrat JamesTalariconarrowly ahead of the state’s Trump-backed Republican attorney general,Ken Paxton, in their contest for a seat in the US Senate.