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Trump’s team tried to block appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to US, reports say

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Donald Trump’s presidential transition team repeatedly intervened in UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, it has been reported.

The president’s aides told Starmer’s national security adviser and former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, on more than one occasion, that they wished for Mandelson’s predecessor Karen Pierce to remain in post, Politico reported this morning.

According to a source close to the president, the message was conveyed during a meeting in December in Palm Beach in December 2024.

Later the same month, the transition team called Powell to tell them they were unhappy with Pierce’s treatment and did not support Mandelson’s appointment.

Politico reported:

double quotation markTrump’s aides were particularly exercised that Mandelson could be made ambassador after he had made disparaging public remarks about the president in the past, according to both officials.

Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles is understood to be one of those unhappy with Mandelson’s appointment, with one source saying she saw him as “arrogant” and rude to staff.

Mandelson was ultimately sacked just nine months into the job after new details emerged about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted child sex offender.

In February, more files were released that revealed the peer was passing information to the convicted sex offender while he was business secretary, including market-sensitive information that sparked the criminal investigation.

In other developments:

Donald Trump created an extremely awkward moment for Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in the Oval Office on Thursday when he responded to a question from a Japanese reporter about why the US attacked Iran without warning allies like Japan, by joking about Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Japan’s prime minister said later she explained to Trump that Japan’s ability to deploy military forces overseas, as he wants, is still limited by the constitution drafted for Japan by the United States after the second world war.
A federal arts commission approved the final design for a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing Donald Trump’s image to celebrate the US’s 250th birthday on 4 July.
The John F Kennedy Presidential Library foundation announced on Thursday that it is awarding Profile in Courage awards to staunch opponents of Donald Trump: the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell and the people of the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who has shown a willingness to cross Trump since he announced that he will not run for re-election, said he will not vote to eliminate the filibuster to force changes to US election law.

Key events

The US state department on Friday established a new bureau to oversee responses to natural disasters and humanitarian crises around the world, capping the Trump administration’s dramatic overhaul of foreign aid, a senior department official said.

Trump officials and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency dismantled the US Agency for International Development after taking office in January 2025, firing thousands of officials and canceling most of its grants before it was absorbed into the state department, Reuters reported.

The official said the new Bureau of Disaster and Humanitarian Response would be staffed by about 200 officials, operate in 12 hubs around the world and receive roughly $5.4bn a year in funding.

It would narrowly focus on “life-saving” aid rather than things like climate projects and what the official called “social causes.“

It would also oversee global food security, said the official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement.

Lauren Aratani

A technical glitch at the understaffed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is masking millions of dollars in campaign contributions to state-level election groups, including key governor and attorney general races, a campaign finance watchdog has told the Guardian.

A total of $51m for the second half of 2025 remains unaccounted for due to this technical error, according to the Center for Political Accountability (CPA), a non-profit that tracks corporate spending.

Researchers at the CPA noticed the discrepancy in February, when donor and spending lists from the year before are typically made public after a 31 January deadline. But so far, the disclosures remain blank.

The gaps come as these organizations face another filing deadline just weeks away, with no sign that the error will be fixed by then.

“It’s a major change in norms for what’s been a pretty routine process for major political organizations,” said Jeanne Hanna, vice-president of research at the CPA. “This is a midterm year that we’re going into. There’s going to be a lot of spending on state races, and these are the groups that are coordinating huge chunks of spending.”

The glitch is affecting the financial disclosures of 527 organizations, which are tax-exempt political campaign groups that are overseen by the IRS.