Trump news: President says US forces killed terrorists behind Paris attacks, after launching latest insults at John McCain

Updates from Washington as they happened on Wednesday

Donald Trump escalates criticism of US war hero: 'I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be'

Donald Trump has resumed his attack on George Conway, the husband of White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, after the latter questioned the president’s mental health.

In response, Mr Trump called the lawyer “a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”

Mr Trump has also been accused of “punching at a person that can’t fight back because he’s dead” over his feud with recently deceased Vietnam War hero and Republican senator John McCain.

“I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be,” Mr Trump said yesterday during a press conference at the White House with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, prompting the comment from CNN anchor Anderson Cooper on the disrespect being shown to a long-serving American public servant who passed away of brain cancer last August, aged 81.

The ongoing attacks on the late senator has led many to express support for the famed Arizonan, even as the president has continued to double down on his criticism of the war hero.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr Trump took a trip to Lima, Ohio, where he visited a tank manufacturing plant and expressed admiration for the "patriotism" he said was on full display in the company.

Before boarding his plane to leave Washington, Mr Trump told reporters that he expects special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election to be released publicly.

Mr Mueller's report is expected any day now, with many reports indicating the investigation is winding down or already finished up.

The report would first be sent to the Justice Department, at which point Attorney General William Barr would determine what form of a report he would pass along to Congress for further review.

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Key Points

• Trump resumes attack on 'stone cold LOSER' husband of adviser Kellyanne Conway
• Criticised over repeated attacks on late senator and war hero John McCain
• Defends electoral college against Democratic calls for reform
• Due to visit Ohio days after attacking GM autoworkers' union

[20 March 2019 08:59 · Joe Sommerlad]

Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.

[20 March 2019 09:39 · Joe Sommerlad]

Donald Trump reignited his "feud" with the late John McCain yesterday, the Republican 2008 presidential candidate and Vietnam veteran who passed away on 25 August 2018 from brain cancer, aged 81, after a life of public service.

“I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be,” Mr Trump said yesterday during a press conference at the White House with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

This came after a series of tweets last weekend in which the president attacked McCain for handing over the Steele Dossier, alleging relations between his inner circle and the Kremlin, to the FBI in 2017.

And, of course, Mr Trump's famous mockery of McCain - a pilot during the Vietnam War who was shot down, captured and held prisoner in Hanoi for six years by the North Vietnamese - for not being a true American hero (having never served himself due to "bone spurs"): "He is a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren't capture."

The attacks provoked an angry but supremely dignified response from McCain's daughter:

And yesterday a sharp rebuke from CNN's Anderson Cooper:

Here's Andrew Buncombe on a controversy as surreal as it is unedifying.

[20 March 2019 09:50 · Joe Sommerlad]

The president has also continued his wild recent run on Twitter, following up attacks on Joe Biden, the media and adviser Kellyanne Conway's husband George ("A total loser!") by retweeting this:

The video appears to show a ludicrously laborious search procedure being carried out on a barefoot teenage boy in shorts (posing no clear threat whatsoever) by a security official.

The post comes from comedian and musician Larry the Cable Guy via right-wing Hollywood actor James Woods, who appears to have got it from a conspiracy theory account called Deep State Exposed.

Welcome to the New Weird.

[20 March 2019 10:00 · Joe Sommerlad]

What is currently on the president's mind (or it was at midnight in Washington, at any rate) is Democratic calls for electoral reform and, particularly, the removal of the Electoral College, which allowed President Trump to win the 2016 campaign despite losing the Popular Vote to Hillary Clinton.

Earlier in the day, he had already served up some thoughts on the matter based on his experiences in 2016:

2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren had started the conversation during a speech at a CNN Town Hall event in Jackson, Mississippi, on Monday night.

Here's Tom Embury-Dennis on President Trump's midnight rant.

[20 March 2019 10:10 · Joe Sommerlad]

Trump ally Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator for South Carolina, represents a conflicted figure these days.

He's torn between his need to "stay relevant" at the side of the president and his friendship with the late John McCain, a mentor whom he has defended on Twitter against Mr Trump's attacks, albeit without daring to call out the slanderer.

Mr Graham has found his voice to join in with Mr Trump's dispute with the Democrats about the merits of the Electoral College, however.

[20 March 2019 10:16 · Joe Sommerlad]

Other lines to come out of his meeting yesterday with Jair Bolsonaro - the "Trump of the Tropics, a fellow right-wing populist known for his love of social media and denouncing "fake news" - was an exchange of football shirts and Mr Trump dangling the possibility of Brazil joining Nato, as though that were something in his immediate power to grant.

There was also this peach on the "twilight of socialism", which is at least a poetic turn of phrase.

[20 March 2019 10:40 · Joe Sommerlad]

Also coming during his address from the Rose Garden was an attack on the supposed anti-conservative bias prevalent on social media: "There's discrimination, there's big discrimination... Something's happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook, and Google, and Twitter, and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it." 

The line followed up on this tweet:

Given that he himself has 59m Twitter followers and sets the international news agenda on a near-daily basis with his frothing tweets about whatever's currently on his mind (or on Fox and Friends), the argument is scarcely credible.

Conservatives like to complain their free speech is under duress whenever an alt-right speaker is banned from a university campus or booted off Facebook, Twittter or YouTube for delivering offensive rhetoric but, coming from President Trump, who makes regular attacks on the press, such concerns hold little water.

Here's Andrew Buncombe again.

[20 March 2019 10:50 · Joe Sommerlad]

All of that might just have been revenge for Facebook embarrassing the Trump administration by mistaking its social media director Dan Savino for a bot.

"AMAZING. WHY ARE YOU STOPPING ME from replying to comments followers have left me - on my own Facebook Page!!?? People have the right to know. Why are you silencing me???" Mr Scavino had complained to the site on Monday after a number of features on his account were disabled.

In a statement, the social media giant said its automated systems had misidentified his account for a fake due to the "repetitive" nature of his activities.

"In order to stop automated bots, we cap the amount of identical, repetitive activity coming from one account in a short period of time, such as @mentioning people. These limits can have the unintended consequence of temporarily preventing real people like Dan Scavino from engaging in such activity, but lift in an hour or two, which is what happened in this case," a spokesman for the Silicon Valley giant said.

"We've been in touch with him and have apologised for the inconvenience."

[20 March 2019 11:05 · Joe Sommerlad]

Not content with making life difficult for Mr Trump over the Electoral College, Elizabeth Warren is also going after the issue of Confederate flags and statues in southern towns, a hot-button issue for many conservatives.

She says monuments to generals who fought for the Old South in the Civil War belong in museums, an interesting, measured compromise that will nevertheless not be well received by the right.

Here's Clark Mindock. 

[20 March 2019 11:20 · Joe Sommerlad]

And she's not the only Democratic 2020 presidential hopeful going after Donald Trump.

California senator and former state attorney-general Kamala Harris told talk show host Jimmy Kimmel last night she intends to "prosecute the case" against Mr Trump.

Here's Chris Baynes.