The Guardian80%
House Democrat calls for congressional hearings on Trump administration’s nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia – as it happened 67%
By Robert Mackey34% Shrai Popat39% Lucy Campbell50% Tom Ambrose32%
7/23/2026, 2:00:24 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Availability Heuristic, and Slippery Slope, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 10% saturation with 194 hits. Analysis detected 1,562 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,931 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 61.2% and a BS Rank of 67% (6,747 of 20,315 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 66.80% of the article peer group.
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day.
Here are the latest developments: The Trump administration signed a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that could enable the kingdom to enrich its own uranium for nuclear reactors.
At a House foreign affairs committee hearing, congressman Brad Sherman, a Los Angeles Democrat, called for an oversight hearing of the Trump administration’s nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, suggesting that exporting that technology could be as big a mistake as having armed the Shah of Iran in the 1970s.
The US House of Representatives passed a $1.15tn defense policy bill in a near-party-line vote, after Democrats refused to back the measure amid the war with Iran and Donald Trump’s push to impose new restrictions on voting nationwide.
During his 75-minute address to supporters in Georgia, Trump took some time out from boasting about what he calls his many accomplishments to attack Jon Ossoff, the incumbent Democratic senator he referred to, confusingly, as “Pinky Herman”.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York congresswoman, denied on Wednesday that the Michigan Senate candidate she supports, Abdul El-Sayed, lacks support from Black voters.
The congresswoman was asked to respond to a comment her Democratic colleague James Clyburn made to the outlet Punchbowl about images of an El-Sayed rally in Detroit on Saturday that she and senator Bernie Sanders spoke at.
Local news photographs, social-media images and video of the rally at the Detroit Opera House shared online showed that the crowd, in a city that is 75% Black, was largely white.
“I saw a picture that concerned me coming out of Michigan.
I saw the rally,” Clyburn told Punchbowl.
“I didn’t see a single person that looks like me.
That tells me all I need to know.”
Some of the Black voters who did attend the rally told Sam Robinson, a Black independent journalist, that they were not troubled by online criticism of a majority white crowd in a majority Black city supporting El-Sayed.
Denzel McCampbell, a Black member of Detroit’s city council who is campaigning for El-Sayed, dismissed what he called “a narrative about this campaign, about Abdul” created by “folks on Twitter”, and insisted that he has seen support for the candidate while knocking on doors in the city.
“His message is something that resonates with folks across a broad spectrum,” McCampbell said.
On its face, the nuclear cooperation agreement, commonly known as a 123 agreement (after the relevant section of the US Atomic Energy Act) signed on Wednesday by the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia looks similar to an agreement signed in 2009 by the Obama administration and the United Arab Emirates.
However, until we see the text, it is not clear if the deals are alike in one key way: whether or not the Saudis have agreed, as the UAE did, to safeguards that would block the kingdom from developing nuclear weapons.
In the UAE deal, first negotiated during the Bush administration, and then reworked and signed by the Obama administration on 21 May, the Emirates agreed to accept the International Atomic Energy Agency’s so-called “additional protocol”, which allows the agency to verify the peaceful use of all nuclear material, and affirmed its commitment “to pursue a renunciation of the development of domestic enrichment and reprocessing capabilities in favor of long-term commitments for the secure external supply of nuclear fuel”.
Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, expressed strong opposition to the Trump administration’s deal to help Saudi Arabia enrich uranium for nuclear energy, a capability that could open the door to the repressive kingdom developing nuclear weapons.
“Trump claims his war on Iran is about stopping an authoritarian country from enriching nuclear fuel,” Sanders wrote on social media.
“Now he’s letting his best friends in Saudi Arabia — one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world — do exactly that.
This is absurd.
No nuclear for the Saudi dictatorship.”
At House foreign affairs committee hearing on Wednesday, congressman Brad Sherman, a Los Angeles Democrat, called for an oversight hearing of the Trump administration’s nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, suggesting that exporting that technology could be as big a mistake as having armed the Shah of Iran in the 1970s.
“There are those who think that the Saudi possession of nuclear technology is totally benign, but I’ve been involved in this for a long time, and I remember when the most powerful monarch in the Middle East was a good friend of America.
And the Shah got his hands on important US military technology.
Thank God, nothing nuclear,” Sherman said while questioning Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, and former national security adviser to Donald Trump.
“Everything the Shah had in 1978 was in the mullahs’ hands in 1979,” Sherman said, referring to the Islamic revolution that toppled the Iranian monarch and brought the theocratic regime to power.
“We have no idea who is going to be running Saudi Arabia 10 years from now.”
During his 75-minute address to supporters in Georgia on Wednesday, Donald Trump took some time out from boasting about what he calls his many accomplishments to attack Jon Ossoff, the incumbent Democratic senator whose withering criticism of the president has thrilled Democrats and led to calls for Ossoff to mount a 2028 presidential campaign, should he first win his reelection bid in November.
“I fought Ossoff before, as you know, and we won.
We had a great success against this guy,” Trump said, fondly recalling his role in Ossoff’s narrow loss in a 2017 special election in Georgia’s sixth congressional district, in what was then a Republican-dominated Atlanta suburb.
“He reminds me of Pinky Herman,” the president said.
“Do you ever see Pinky Herman?”
Trump asked, a comment that prompted some laughter from his supporters in the hall, and a scramble, among journalists, to figure out what, exactly, he was talking about.
It was not until fully thirteen minutes later, when Trump predicted that Ossoff’s Republican challenger, Mike Collins, is “going to beat Pee-wee Herman”, that the 80-year-old president’s reference to the character played by the late comic actor Paul Reubens four decades ago became clear.
For a president who rose to power largely through his insult-comic hits on his political opponents, it was a peculiarly low-energy jibe, given that Ossoff, who was once as skinny as the Reubens character, has now bulked up, and speaks about the president in a tone of righteous indignation that bears no resemblance to Pee-wee’s squeaky voice.
Trump made no mention at all of the prominent role he played in trying, and failing, to stop Ossoff from winning his Senate seat in a run-off election on 5 January, 2021.
The night before that election, in which Democratic senator Raphael Warnock also won his seat, Trump had traveled to Georgia to speak at a rally for the two Republican candidates, senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
Rather than urging voters to support the Republican candidates, Trump instead undermined confidence in the electoral system in remarks focused mainly on his claim that the presidential election just two months earlier had been stolen from him.
“Hello, Georgia!
By the way, there is no way we lost Georgia.
There’s no way, … That was a rigged election” Trump began his speech that night.
“When you win in a landslide, and they steal it, and it’s rigged, it’s not acceptable,” he told the crowd, hours before Republican turnout slumped and Ossoff and Warnock were elected, swinging control of the Senate to the Democrats.
The Trump administration signed a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that could enable the kingdom to enrich its own uranium for nuclear reactors, US Energy secretary Chris Wright said in a press release.
According to a statement from the Department of Energy, Wright and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, signed “a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement” and “an accompanying bilateral safeguards agreement.”
The question of what those safeguards look like, given the potential for enriched uranium to be used to make nuclear weapons, will be closely scrutinized when the agreement is sent to Congress for review.
The two agreements, the press release said, “lay the legal foundation for a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership that advances several priority economic and strategic objectives, including nuclear nonproliferation.”
“These agreements reflect our two nations’ shared commitment to strengthening U.S.-Saudi commercial relations, delivering prosperity at home and security to our allies abroad,” Wright said in a statement.
“Rest assured, these agreements uphold the highest standards of nuclear safety and nonproliferation, while relying on the world’s best nuclear technology and scientists, designed right here in the United States.”
The US House of Representatives passed a $1.15tn defense policy bill in a near-party-line vote on Wednesday, after Democrats refused to back the measure amid the war with Iran and Donald Trump’s push to impose new restrictions on voting nationwide.
A key plank of the president’s plan to spend $1.5tn on the military in the 2027 fiscal year, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passed the Republican-controlled chamber by a 216-212 vote, with nearly all Democrats opposing its passage.
The measure now goes to the Senate.
Congress passes the NDAA each year with bipartisan margins, with the measure’s high cost seen as necessary to make generational investments in the military.
“For the first time in 40 years, we’ve been presented a budget that accounts for the true cost of American deterrence.
This topline begins to reverse the damage caused by decades of underinvestment in the US military,” Mike Rogers, the House armed services committee chair, said before the vote.
Donald Trump scoffed at the word “affordability” as a political message, describing it at a campaign rally on Wednesday as a term concocted by Democratic political consultants to criticize his presidency.
Yet even as the president dismissed the notion of affordability, he devoted much of his speech at Wheeler high school to touting the bread-and-butter benefits of his economic policies.
“So I just want you to remember that if you’re paying a little bit more – a lot of it’s come down now, we got it coming down very rapidly actually,” Trump said in Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, casting higher prices today as a lingering effect of the Biden administration.
Americans are broadly disappointed with Trump’s handling of the economy, with just 33% of voters approving in a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll, an assessment that could hurt his party’s hopes of bucking historical precedent and retaining control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
As the US strikes again targets in Iran in retaliation for that nation’s blockade of the strait of Hormuz, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claim to have attacked two Saudi oil tankers for violating a blockade near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint for oil exports transiting the Red Sea.
Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen, led a military intervention in 2015, triggering a year-long civil war to prop up Yemen’s Saudi-backed government.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre said in an alert issued on Wednesday night it “has received a report of an incident 70NM southwest of AL SHUQAIQ, Saudi Arabia.
The Master of a tanker reports being struck by an unknown projectile which has caused a fire onboard that the crew are currently fighting.”
Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, responded to news of the Houthi attacks by writing on social media: “Everyone saw all of this coming.
This chaos was totally foreseeable and Trump chose to start this war anyway.”
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