Hegseth says he will cut number of US generals by 20% in anti-diversity speech – as it happened

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

• The latest in a series of pro-Trump ads the Trump administration is using taxpayer funds to air on television in the run-up to the the midterm elections is a 1-minute spot that celebrates his decision to go to war with Iran.

• Pete Hegseth announced that Elon Musk will co-lead a government project to study the future of warfare, with Palmer Luckey, CEO of the defense tech company Anduril, and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House.

• An internal watchdog said the Federal Reserve mismanaged costs associated with a $2.4bn renovation of its Washington DC headquarters, but noted that no criminal violations occurred, according to a report released Wednesday.

The latest in a series of pro-Trump ads the Trump administration is using taxpayer funds to air on television in the run-up to the the midterm elections is a 1-minute spot that celebrates his decision to go to war with Iran.

The ad aired during a commercial break on Fox News Wednesday night, according video posted online by MeidasTouch, a leftwing outlet.

A copy of the new ad posted on social media by Medium Buying, a company that buys airtime for Republican candidates, shows that it features audio taken from Donald Trump’s 28 February declaration that the United States military had begun major combat operations in Iran.

“This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States Armed Forces,” Trump can be heard saying over images of combat, some of which appear to be dramatizations or computer-generated. A cover version of John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom provides the soundtrack.

The audio then switches to comments made by Pete Hegseth the US defense secretary, in a briefing on the third day of the war. “He reminded the world, as he has time and time again, being an American means something unbreakable,” Hegseth says over slow-motion images of Trump walking down a corridor.

“If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you,” Hegseth says . “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. Their war on Americans has become our retribution against their ayatollah”.

As the words “Paid for by the U.S. Government” appear at the bottom of the screen, the ad’s audio switches back to Trump’s call for regime change in Iran in his announcement of the war in February.

“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump can be heard saying, over images of Iranian Americans in New York celebrating the US strikes on 1 March. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

The images of Iranian Americans demonstrating in support of Trump’s war in New York City, marching down 42nd Street and holding signs that read “Thank you president Trump”, were all previously included in a White House video posted on YouTube on 4 March.

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The focus of the ad on speeches and images of celebration that all came in the first three days of the war, when it looked like Iran’s government could collapse, makes its release now, as the war enters its seven month and continues to alienate Trump’s supporters, baffling.

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit against Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, over his refusal to hand over unredacted, sensitive voter information to the Department of Justice.

The justice department had demanded that the state’s senior election official email a copy of Georgia’s statewide voter registration list, including each voter’s driver’s license number, social security number and date of birth, arguing that the National Voter Registration Act, a federal law, entitled it to this information.

The US district court judge, Victoria Marie Calvert, ruled that the federal law does not require states to disclose sensitive voter data to the federal government, and does not take precedence over Georgia’s state law protecting the privacy of information provided to the state by registered voters.

Raffensperger was the Georgia state official Donald Trump called on 2 January 2021, in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” for Joe Biden that could be tossed out as fraudulent, which would have allowed Trump to reverse his loss and win the state by one vote.

In keeping with his near-constant use of his office for thinly disguised campaign events, Donald Trump had Alaska’s Republican senator Dan Sullivan by his side in the Oval Office on Wednesday when he announced that South Korea plans to spend $54bn to build a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska.

Sullivan is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Mary Peltola to retain his Senate seat in the November midterm elections.

Unfortunately for Sullivan, the president wrongly suggested that an issue that is infuriating voters in his home state, the high price of gasoline and diesel, would be solved by the pipeline, which will transport an entirely different kind of petroleum, natural gas, when it is completed in three years.

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The Alaska LNG project includes an 807-mile (1,299km) pipeline to carry natural gas from the North Slope to a liquefaction facility on Alaska’s southern coast, allowing the fuel to be shipped to Asian markets.

Asked by a reporter about whether there has been any discussion of building another oil pipeline in Alaska, given the high cost of gasoline for consumers, Trump appeared to confuse the liquefied natural gas, known as LNG, with gasoline, which is made from oil.

“Well, this is going to bring those prices down. One of the reasons, Alaska prices are going to come way down,” Trump said of a project that has nothing to do with gasoline used to fuel cars.

After Trump was informed that the the LNG pipeline is going to take three years to complete, which would lower the cost of LNG in Alaska, but have no impact at all on the cost of another petroleum product, gasoline, Trump turned back to reporters and said: “Gasoline prices in Alaska are going to tumble.”

Trump also said that the Korean investment was part of a $200bn package of projects that would also include a 6-gigawatt ⁠power generation facility in Texas, another state where his party is in danger of losing a Senate seat.

The announced investment follows pledges South Korea made in 2025 to invest up to $350bn in the US as part of a trade deal in exchange for lower US tariffs on South Korean cars, auto parts and other products.

Without providing those details, Trump credited his tariffs for making the announcement possible, saying “our trade agreement with South Korea, they have to invest hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“For doing that, I reduced their tariffs to 15%. But they paid to get them reduced,” Trump said. “And, part of that money is going into this project.”

Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that Elon Musk will co-lead a government project to study the future of warfare, marking the SpaceX CEO’s first return to government since he ran the chaotic, so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge. Musk will be joined by Palmer Luckey, CEO of the defense tech company Anduril, and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House.

A defense department press release on the effort, called Project Meridian, described its goal as “identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield”. The project will run for 120 days and culminate in an unclassified public report of its recommendations.

The defense department’s project brings Musk back into government work a little more than a year after his explosive tenure as leader of Doge, which gutted federal agencies while failing to achieve its stated cost-cutting goals. It is also a sign of how Musk has re-entered the good graces of the Trump administration after a dramatic falling out with the president last year.

Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he had spoken to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, about the security incident on a FlyDubai commercial flight from the United Arab Emirates to Israel on Wednesday.

“It seems as though the co-pilot was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack job,” Trump said, before giving a dramatic account of the intervention of a passenger who subdued the pilot who reportedly stabbed his co-pilot.

Although witnesses on the flight said that an off-duty pilot then entered the cockpit, pulled the aircraft up and landed in Saudi Arabia, Trump told reporters that “an Israeli plumber” first subdued the attacker, “and this plumber, having never flown a plane, he took the stick, lifted it up, and leveled out the plane before it crashed. Now this is the story that I heard. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s the story I got from Bibi.”

Before we move on from Pete Hegseth’s lengthy address today, it is worth noting that the Pentagon’s in-house “rapid response” social media account, which is dedicated to battling with the media in the style of a political campaign’s opposition research unit, made a point of highlighting the defense secretary’s scathing criticism of the US press corps.

The Pentagon account shared video and a partial transcript of Hegseth addressing reporters he called “the anti-American losers in our media” in prepared remarks that sounded more like a script written by one of Hegseth’s former Fox News producers than a speech by a US cabinet official.

Hegseth went on to say: “The information space is a battle space. Yet our so-called press makes Iranian state media look reasonable. Our media’s shameful lust for political retribution blinds them to the consequences of reckless, so-called ‘reporting’. So-called journalists – juiced up on Trump derangement syndrome – think they’re fighting against our president, but they’re really undermining you – our warfighters.”

“Bottom line: too many of them hate the president more than they love the country. You see, it’s your movement and bases that they reveal to the enemy,” Hegseth told the troops before him. “And ultimately, it’s your lives they put directly at risk when they lie about munitions stockpiles.

“All for a banner that will scroll on TV for 30 seconds,” the former Fox weekend host said. “And I know a little bit about banners scrolling on TV for 30 seconds.”

• Pete Hegseth officially announced 20% cuts to generals and admirals “across the board” in the US military. The defense secretary added that the generals “who clung to the woke department or seemed to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion, well, they no longer work here”.

• Hegseth appeared to downplay the ongoing mental health crisis in parts of the US military, particularly after eight navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln attempted suicide since the start of their lengthy deployment. Nonetheless, the defense secretary slammed the media, and insisted that there are “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, patently false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda, as if it’s written by our adversaries”. It’s worth noting that Hung Cao, the acting US navy secretary, confirmed the suicide attempts in a letter to the US senator Kirsten Gillibrand earlier this month.

• Throughout his address, Hegseth boasted touted his anti-diversity policies. He insisted that the Pentagon was “no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

• He also announced a new project which will see Elon Musk, Palmer Lucky – a top Trump donor and ally – and Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker, work with department to study the “future of warfare”. “Their work will be focused on discovering, developing, and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes,” Hegseth said, noting the project’s findings would be completed and submitted within 120 days, culminating in a full public rollout.

• Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats blocked legislation that would allow states and utilities to consider standards to ensure tech companies foot the bill for the additional energy costs associated with power-intensive datacenters throughout the US. In a 57-43 vote on the Ratepayer Protection Act, four Democrats – Maggie Hassan, Amy Klobuchar, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – all broke with their party in support of the bill. However, the legislation failed to achieve the 60 votes needed to advance out of the Republican-controlled upper chamber. More here

• Earlier, Democrats in the Senate also blocked legislation that would prohibit lawmakers, their spouses and their dependent children from purchasing publicly traded stocks. The Stop Insider Trading Act failed along party lines, in a 53-47 vote, failing to clear the 60-vote threshold. Despite widespread support for stopping members of Congress from trading stocks, many Democrats argued the bill didn’t go far enough to actually solve the issue. They also took issue with the fact that the House-passed bill also included a provision which would require photo identification when casting a ballot. More here

Hegseth’s ‘State of the Force’ address also includes an announcement about partnering with a new group of higher education institutions.

The defense secretary took aim at Ivy League universities and liberal arts colleges – which the Trump administration has targeted routinely – as “DEI worshipping woke factories”. Hegseth said the department would now partner with other institutions– some of which are known for conservative values, such as Liberty University and Hillsdale College.

Other schools joining the partnership are Louisiana State University, Mississippi University and Tuskegee University.

It’s worth remembering that Hegseth attended and graduated from Princeton and Harvard – both Ivy League universities.

The defense secretary announced a new Pentagon project that will see Elon Musk, Palmer Lucky – a top Trump donor and ally – and Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker, work with department to study the “future of warfare”.

“Their work will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes,” Pete Hegseth said, noting the project’s findings would be completed and submitted within 120 days, culminating in a full public rollout.

If Palmer Lucky’s name sounds familiar to you, that might be because the Guardian has reported extensively about how his company, Anduril Industries, a major military contractor, has received billions in government contracts over the last year.