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Allies Push Back On Trump’s Demand They Send Warships To Strait Of Hormuz (Updated)

Members of the NATO alliance are denying U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand that they send warships to help protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz after frequent Iranian attacks. As we noted yesterday, the president said that “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”

Germany on Monday outright rejected the demand.

“This is not our war; we did not start it,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters in Berlin on Monday. “We want diplomatic solutions and a swift end to the conflict, but sending more warships to the region will likely not help achieve that.”

WATCH: German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius:

We did not start this war.

What does the world expect, what does Donald Trump expect from a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to achieve there in the Strait of Hormuz, which the powerful American Navy cannot manage… https://t.co/lO4WR2zly3 pic.twitter.com/MWwu3U4xyS

— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 16, 2026

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul doesn’t see NATO playing a role in dealing with the blockade of the Strait.

“I don’t see that NATO has made any decision in this direction or could assume responsibility for the Strait of Hormuz,” he said Monday ahead of a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels. “If that were the case, then the NATO bodies would address it accordingly.”

Wadephul added that despite the volatile situation in the Middle East, Ukraine remained Europe’s top security priority, the BBC noted. When the prices for oil and gas rise, he explained, it contributes to Russia’s war chest.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Wadephul on Iran War:

Will we soon be an active part of this conflict? No.

We will not participate in this conflict.

We want to participate in negotiations, because security for the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea will only be achieved through a… pic.twitter.com/J6cJNxXWsO

— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 16, 2026

Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel offered a blunter response to Trump’s demand.

“Blackmail is not what I wish for,” he stated, adding that NATO is there to react when members are attacked, not for all defensive or military requests, Bloomberg News noted.

“I want to remind that none of us has been directly attacked,” he said. “There are no grounds for now to invoke Article 5,” he added, referencing the alliance’s collective defense clause.

Germany and Luxembourg joined Japan and Australia in rejecting Trump’s call for help in reopening the Strait, at least for now.

The main gate at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, was reopened Monday afternoon after a bomb scare. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Vernon L. Fowler Jr MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa is home to both U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command. *U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Vernon L. Fowler Jr.*

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POLITICS

Trump’s mass deportation agenda is at a crossroads with the Homeland Security shake-up

Mar 17, 2026 Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security will soon be under new management, an opportunity to reset President Trump’s immigration agenda or to double down on his signature campaign promise to conduct the largest deportation operation in American history.

The White House’s political director recently encouraged party lawmakers during a retreat at the Republican president’s golf club in Florida to focus on immigration enforcement against criminals, a pivot from the mass deportation agenda he ran on. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the aggressive operations have created a “hiccup” for the party, which is now embarking on a “course correction.”

Yet all indications are that Trump’s mass deportation operation is not stalling but intensifying, with billions of dollars being spent to hire Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, build warehouse detention sites and meet the administration’s goal of rounding up and removing some 1 million immigrants from the U.S. this year.

“We are at an interesting moment where it has been an inflection point — the public has finally seen what mass detention and mass deportation mean,” said Sarah Mehta, who tracks the issue at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“This is not an agency that’s slowing down,” she said. “They’re really going forward with some of the cruelest policies.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the president’s policies have sent immigrants out of the U.S., either through forced deportations or on their own, and sealed up the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Nobody is changing the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” she said.

Senators ready to grill Trump’s DHS nominee over deportations

The questions put Homeland Security at a crossroads. Secretary Kristi Noem is on her way out, and Trump’s nominee to replace her, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, appears this week for Senate confirmation hearings.

After the intense deportation sweeps in Minneapolis and other cities — and the deaths of at least three U.S. citizens at the hands of officers — Democratic lawmakers are refusing to provide routine funding unless the department changes its policies.

At the same time, those who believe Trump won the White House with his mass deportation agenda are disappointed the administration did not achieve its goals last year and insist he must do better.

“There has been a lot of talk in Congress and now in the White House about kind of backing away from President Trump’s, candidate Trump’s, mass deportation promise,” said Rosemary Jenks, co-founder of the Immigration Accountability Project, which argues for deportations.

“We believe that now is an opportunity,” she said. “We’ve got to get the deportation numbers up.”

A nation of immigrants no longer?

The debate is playing out as the United States, celebrating its 250th year, squares its founding as a nation of immigrants with images of masked federal agents breaking car windows and detaining people suspected of being in the U.S. without proper legal standing.

The Congress, controlled by Republicans, provided some $170 billion in last year’s tax cuts bill to fuel the effort, more than tripling the budget of ICE.

GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, in a fiery speech, fought back against the Democrats’ proposed restraints. “This question about deporting illegal immigrants was on the ballot. President Trump was not bashful,” he said. “And the American people supported the idea that we are going to deport people.”

Yet there are signs of cracks in the Trump coalition. Some Republicans prefer what one called a more humane approach and are sharing their views with Mullin.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), considered a stalwart against illegal immigration, said in his state it’s immigrants who milk most of the dairy cows, and he’s heard from restaurant groups that rely on immigrants to fill jobs.

“Can we just turn back the clock and have … all these people who came in here illegally, just be back home?” he asked.

“In terms of actually implementing that, it’s a lot tougher — particularly, in fact, when you realize a lot of these people, most of them, came here to seek opportunity, wanting freedom,” he said. “They’re working, supporting their family, contributing to organizations and community.”

Mass deportation group wants more

The Mass Deportation Coalition, a group of conservative organizations including the Heritage Foundation and Erik Prince, founder of the security firm Blackwater, was formed recently to keep the administration on track.

It calls last year’s focus on removing violent criminal immigrants “phase one” and says “phase two” should focus this year on deporting immigrants beyond those with violent criminal histories.

Mark Morgan, who served as acting head of ICE and Customs and Border Protection during Trump’s first term and is part of the coalition, said that doesn’t mean roving patrols through Home Depot parking lots. It’s about strategic enforcement focused on immigrants at worksites and those who have overstayed visas and whom a judge has already ordered removed, he said.

But they’re facing opposition from within the Republican Party, Morgan said, particularly from those who want to narrow deportation to mainly criminals and from business groups that want to ease up on worksite enforcement.

“The Republicans that are saying that their definition of targeted enforcement is only criminal, they’re wrong. They’re on the wrong side of this,” he said.

“That’s why you see some of the base that’s really becoming apoplectic because they’re like, ‘Wait a minute. You’re talking about only removing criminals now? That’s not what you promised,’” Morgan said.

What’s coming next

The deportation advocates as well as those working to protect the rights of immigrants see that the Trump administration’s best chance at reaching its goals is creating an environment so unwelcoming for immigrants that they just leave — what’s often called self-deportation.

Mehta, at the ACLU, expects the administration will step up efforts to end temporary permissions that allow immigrants to remain in the U.S. — particularly refugees and asylum seekers — while their cases are making their way through the system. She called it a “deliberate attempt to make people undocumented — to take away lawful status — and then to be able to enforce against them.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said he fears that more nonviolent immigrants will be rounded up to fill the new warehouses being equipped as the Trump administration tries to reach its deportation goals.

That’s unacceptable, he said, and among “the key questions that Senator Mullin will have to answer at his confirmation hearing.”

Mascaro, Santana and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press.

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POLITICS

Supreme Court will rule on Trump’s plan to end temporary protection for Haitians, Syrians

Mar 16, 2026 Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to rule on whether the Trump administration may end the temporary protection that had been extended in the past to migrants who live and work in the United States.

At issue are legal protections for about 6,000 Syrians and up to 350,000 Haitians.

The court’s announcement signals the justices want to resolve this issue in a written opinion rather through emergency appeals.

Twice last year, the court’s conservatives set aside decisions from judges in San Francisco who said President Trump’s Homeland Security secretary had overstepped her authority.

Those cases involved the temporary protection status extended to about 600,000 Venezuelans.

But those decisions did not set clear precedents, and in recent weeks, judges in New York and Washington, D.C., blocked the administration’s plan to end the special protections for Haitians and Syrians.

Frustrated by what he labeled “indefensible” decisions, Trump’s Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer advised the court to hear arguments and issue a written ruling on the issue.

The justices on Monday agreed to just that. Arguments will be heard in April, and a decision will be handed down by July.

Immigrant-rights advocates argued the repeal of the special protection would be cruel and unjust to migrants who have established lives and careers in this country.

In 1990, Congress authorized giving temporary shelter to non-citizens from countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disaster or “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevent them from returning there.

In 2012, the Homeland Security secretary extended this protection to Syrians in response to a “brutal crackdown” engineered by its then-President Bashar al-Assad.

Last year, citing Assad’s fall from power, Trump’s Secretary Kristi Noem proposed to cancel the temporary protection for Syrians. Lawyers for the Syrians questioned how this could be seen as an emergency requiring an immediate ruling.

They said about 6,100 Syrians who have lived here lawfully for years.

They are “highly sought-after doctors and medical professionals, reporters, students, teachers, business owners, caretakers, and others who have been repeatedly vetted and by definition have virtually no criminal history. The government apparently needs urgent authority to send them to a country in the middle of an active war,” the lawyers said.

In 2010, the Obama administration extended the protection to Haiti after an earthquake caused death and damage in Port-au-Prince, the capital.

Judges in New York and Washington blocked those repeals and said the high court had given “no explanation” for its decision upholding the repeal for Venezuelans.

Those judges said the Supreme Court’s earlier orders orders “involved a TPS designation of a different country, with different factual circumstances, and different grounds for resolution by the district court.”

Sauer pointed to a provision in the 1990 law that says judges have no authority to second-guess the government’s decision to end it.

“There is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection,” the law says.

In the three weeks since Trump’s attorney filed his emergency appeal, there have been two significant changes since then.

Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And his war launched against Iran threatens countries throughout the Mideast, including Syria.

In agreeing to hear the pair of cases, the justices did not disturb the lower court rulings that blocked the repeals for now.

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POLITICS

BBC asks U.S. court to dismiss Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit

Mar 16, 2026 Politics Desk

LONDON — The BBC filed a motion Monday asking a U.S. court to dismiss President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against it.

The British national broadcaster said that the Florida court where the case is expected to be heard does not have jurisdiction over it. It also argued that Trump could not show that it intended to misrepresent him.

Trump filed a lawsuit in December over the way a BBC documentary edited a speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2021. The claim seeks $5 billion in damages for defamation and a further $5 billion for unfair trade practices.

Last month a judge at the federal court for the Southern District of Florida provisionally set a trial date for February 2027.

The BBC argued that the case should be thrown out because the documentary was never aired in Florida or the U.S.

“We have therefore challenged jurisdiction of the Florida court and filed a motion to dismiss the president’s claim,” the corporation said in a statement.

In a 34-page document, the BBC also argued that Trump failed to “plausibly allege facts showing that defendants knowingly intended to create a false impression.”

Trump’s case “falls well short of the high bar of actual malice,” it added.

The documentary — titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” — was aired days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The program spliced together three quotes from two sections of a speech Trump made on Jan. 6, 2021, into what appeared to be one quote, in which Trump appeared to explicitly encourage his supporters to storm the Capitol building.

Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

The broadcaster’s chairman has apologized to Trump over the edit of the speech, admitting that it gave “the impression of a direct call for violent action.” But the BBC rejects claims it defamed him. The furor triggered the resignations of the BBC’s top executive and its head of news last year.

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POLITICS

Trump’s delay of wheelchair rule frustrates disabled flIers

Mar 15, 2026 Politics Desk

WHITE SALMON, Wash. — Seth McBride’s life was forever changed on a snowy mountainside in British Columbia.

McBride was — and is — a thrill-seeker. Growing up in Juneau, Ala., with the untamed outdoors as his stomping ground, he loved to rock climb, mountain bike and, especially, strap on his skis and fly, soaring headlong off heart-pounding cliffs, crags and cornices.

A few months before his senior year in high school, McBride was at a terrain park at Whistler Blackcomb resort. He was 17. He launched a maneuver he’d completed many times before, a back flip off a steep jump. Only this time, he over-accelerated, over-rotated and came down on his neck. Right away he knew something was wrong.

“As soon as I landed,” McBride recalled more than 25 years later, “I lost all sensation in my legs and my lower back.”

The prognosis was grim; doctors told McBride he probably would never walk again, and he hasn’t.

But that’s scarcely slowed him down.

Views of the 47th president, from the ground up

Before they had kids, McBride and his wife biked 6,500 miles — McBride using a special, hand-cranked cycle — from Portland, Ore., to the southern tip of Argentina. He’s traveled the world as a wheelchair rugby player, winning gold, silver and bronze medals at Paralympic Games in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro and London.

McBride — adventurer, daredevil — appears unflappable. Until it comes to air travel.

It’s not the hassles and aggravation that most people put up with. Every trip requires McBride, 43, to undergo a special regimen, dehydrating himself so he won’t have to use the bathroom in flight. Every excursion includes the likelihood of being uncomfortably jostled or, worse, dropped as he’s being transferred to his seat. He can never be certain his wheelchair, his lifeline, won’t be damaged or missing once his plane lands.

“There are very few places or in my life that I feel less independent” than an airport, said McBride, who still plays competitive rugby at the club level. “None of the systems are set up for wheelchair users to be able to manage things on their own.”

Wheelchairs at Portland International Airport in Oregon

For a time, as the Biden administration was winding down, it looked as though that was about to change somewhat. The federal government issued a set of regulations that would require airlines, among other things, to assume liability for damaged and delayed wheelchairs and improve training for staff working with passengers facing mobility issues.

But the Trump administration, which has made deregulation one of its highest imperatives, put those requirements on hold while a trade association and several major airlines sue to keep the changes from taking effect.

For McBride and others like him, it’s a disappointing setback that follows years of pressing Washington to make air transit just a bit more decent and humane.

“It sucks,” McBride said of the dignity-deflating status of a wheelchair traveler. “I know quite a few people who simply won’t fly anymore.”

::

When the Biden administration published new airline regulations in the Federal Register, it spelled out its reasoning.

Passengers forced to surrender their wheelchairs “must rely on airline staff and contractors to properly handle a wheelchair or scooter and return it in a timely manner in the condition it was received. Advocates have stressed … that, when an individual’s wheelchair or scooter is damaged by an airline, the individual’s mobility, health and freedom are impacted until the device can be returned, repaired or replaced.”

What’s more, “Advocates note that wheelchairs are often custom fitted to meet the needs and shapes of each user. Spending time in an ill-fitting chair can cause serious injury, such as pressure sores, and even death because of a subsequent infection.”

The Department of Transportation estimated that, in 2024, 1 of every 100 wheelchairs or scooters placed on a domestic flight was lost, damaged or delayed. Which may not seem like a terribly large number, unless you’re the person whose well-being, and even survival, depends on their wheelchair or scooter being at the ready and operational upon arrival.

Mia Ives-Rublee directs the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. She said airlines, which cater to luxury travelers and treat everyone else like sardines, have long put profit and expedience ahead of the needs of their disabled passengers.

“We’ve seen this tension continue to build as disabled people become more active and the world becomes more accessible. They want to travel, or have jobs that require travel,” said Ives-Rublee. While discrimination is plainly illegal, “Airlines aren’t doing enough to protect our devices,” which has the effect of making it “very difficult for disabled people to travel.”

Ives-Rublee has had nearly a half dozen wheelchairs broken by airlines in the last 20 years, which can be costly as well as life-threatening. A manually operated wheelchair can run as much as $2,000, Ives-Rublee said. A mechanized wheelchair can cost as much as a used car.

Travelers at Portland International Airport in Oregon

(McBride said he’s suffered nicks and scrapes on his “everyday chair.” Worse, was the damage done to wheelchairs he uses in rugby competition, which “is obviously a big deal” when he’s traveling for a match.)

In their lawsuit opposing the rules change, airlines and their trade group said the Biden administration overstepped its authority and the new requirements were too burdensome. Strict liability for wheelchair damage also could expose air carriers to “unreasonable financial risk,” the suit claimed.

The wheelchair rules were supposed to take effect just before Biden left office. The Trump administration postponed them until March 2025, then pushed implementation to August 2025. Now, the Department of Transportation says it will issue a new rule this coming August, with a 60-day comment period to follow — meaning no change will come until at least 2027.

Ives-Rublee hasn’t much hope for relief.

“Given the nature of the administration right now, I doubt they’re putting much effort into protecting” the Biden-era regulations, she said

::

The last thing McBride wants is anyone feeling sorry for him. He’s no victim.

“It was something s— that happened to me,” he said of the accident that left him paralyzed. “But s— stuff happens to people all the time. What matters is how you move forward and what you can do with your life after that happens.”

McBride was seated at the kitchen table of his custom-built home, two miles above the Columbia River in rural Washington state. The house — one level, bright and airy, with concrete floors to smooth the path of his wheelchair — perches at the end of a steep dirt road. A forest in the backyard gives his children, ages 4 and 8, the same freedom to romp through nature he enjoyed growing up in Alaska. There’s also a climbing wall in his son’s bedroom.

Working remotely, McBride writes for New Mobility, a magazine for wheelchair users, and heads communications and marketing for the United Spinal Assn., a nonprofit advocacy group.

His politics run to the left side of the spectrum. (On a cold, drizzly morning, McBride wore a black Oregon Ducks hoodie, honoring his alma mater, the University of Oregon, and its home in liberal Eugene.) Yet while he’s no Trump fan, McBride doesn’t consider making life easier for wheelchair users to be a partisan issue. After all, he pointed out, it was a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, who signed into law the landmark Americans
With Disabilities Act.

“We’ve made a lot of progress as a community working with Republicans, working with Democrats,” he said, as the sun made a brief appearance, illuminating the Douglas firs outside his door. “The basic issues of people being able to access the same services and the same experiences as everyone else shouldn’t be political. … It’s a safety thing.”

He’s not unalterably opposed to deregulation, per se.

“I think it’s a huge issue within systems when it’s overly complex for companies or people to do anything,” McBride said. “But lots of time regulations are there for a reason. It’s when private companies aren’t necessarily doing a good enough job protecting the safety or the rights of all people within a society.”

Given a chance to address Trump or the head of his Transportation Department, Sean Duffy, McBride would say this: Come, let’s take a plane ride.

“Go on a trip with my rugby team and see what it’s like when you have multiple wheelchair users on the same plane,” he said, “and how difficult it is and why we feel like regulations are needed so we can have a modicum of safety and dignity when we’re flying.”

The cost of accommodation might take away some from the airlines’ bottom line. But certain things can’t be priced in dollars and cents.

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How Trump’s unchecked power has changed the world | US-Israel war on Iran News

Mar 15, 2026 News Desk

The decision by United States President Donald Trump to launch a war on Iran has left many international law experts questioning if the world order established after World War II is actually working.

In his second presidential term, Trump seems to be wielding total power without restraint, and the system of checks and balances enshrined in the US Constitution appears to be failing to limit his power.

Has international law put any checks on Trump?

Not so far.

According to analysts, both his attacks on Venezuela and Iran were in clear breach of international law and the UN Charter, principally the prohibition on the use of force under Article 2(4).

Debates about international law, how it has been geared over the decades to underpin the interests of the West and the US specifically, are hardly new. However, experts said, the Trump presidency has seen even the notional restraints of international law trampled underfoot.

Trump himself has brushed aside international law, saying in January that it would be up to him to decide when and how much international law applied to the US and his actions.

“In many respects, international law has historically served US interests, and self-interest should continue to generate US support for a rules-based order organised around the core principles enshrined in the UN Charter,” Michael Becker, a professor of international human rights law at Trinity College in Dublin who previously worked at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, told Al Jazeera, “But finding value in international law often requires adopting a long-term outlook that does not sit easily with short-term political agendas.”

“In the current geopolitical climate, the capacity of international law to provide a meaningful constraint on US action under Donald Trump has proven negligible,” Becker added. “That seems unlikely to change, especially given the failure by other states to strike a united front against Trump’s gangsterism.”

What about the UN?

Not so much.

From its founding, the role of the UN has been to promote dialogue instead of conflict and provide a global response to international challenges. However, Trump’s relationship with the body, like so many of the president’s associations, has rarely been so straightforward. On the one hand, while appearing to try to supplant the body with his members-only Board of Peace as well as sidelining UN aid efforts in Gaza, he has on occasion sought the legitimacy of the UN for a number of his projects, such as his calls in August for the UN to establish a Support Office in Haiti, to help limit migration to the US.

However, while the support of the UN may be helpful, it is clear that Trump has no intention of abiding by its charter, Richard Gowan, the Crisis Group’s UN director from 2019 to 2025, said.

“While other UN members see the US is breaking international law on a regular basis, they often hold back from criticising Washington too loudly in forums like the Security Council because they fear blowback from Trump,” Gowan said. “So Trump is learning he can sidestep the UN when he wants to and get away with it while occasionally using it for instrumental purposes.”

What about other powers?

Up to a point.

Many countries known as “middle powers”, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and other Western and European states, have proven successful so far in pushing back against Trump’s efforts to unilaterally annex Greenland. But European powers have failed to condemn Trump’s unprovoked war on Venezuela and Iran, exposing their double standards in conflicts in the Middle East and the Global South.

Many analysts expect that a withdrawal of investments in the US by Gulf states, which are bearing the brunt of Iran’s retaliation to US and Israeli attacks, may also hasten the war’s end.

“Middle powers can generate friction but not a veto,” HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London said. “Collective action – European governments, Gulf states – can raise costs and extract tactical adjustments. The structural imbalance remains: The US retains decisive military, financial and institutional primacy.”

Smaller states often hedge their bets, follow Washington or look to regional alliances for protection, Hellyer added, continuing that while pressure was strongest in Europe, where the US is no longer seen as a reliable security guarantor, the idea of establishing an alternative continues to be a hurdle. “The logic of an alternative model is accepted; the capacity to execute it quickly is not. A prolonged interregnum follows. The Gulf Arab states are in an analogous position,” he said.

In the meantime, Trump and the US are free to act as they choose. “These are exposure-management strategies, pursued until structural dependence on the US security umbrella can be reduced,” he said.

China and Russia have so far criticised the breaches of international law while avoiding clear escalation, and India and other members of the BRICS bloc have largely stayed silent, suggesting a preference for strategic ambiguity over confronting Washington directly.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned Trump of a ‘rupture’ in the Western alliance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2026 [File: Denis Balibouse/Reuters]

What about domestic restraints?

Not really.

The US Supreme Court was able to block Trump’s use of tariffs to manage large parts of his foreign policy by rewarding allies with lower tariffs and punishing critics with punitive import duties.

But none of the other traditional guardrails – such as Congress; the Department of Justice, which has provided unwavering support to the president; and even the news media – has contained the president’s ambitions. This isn’t entirely new. Previous presidents have ordered wars without congressional approval. However, with Trump, analysts suggested, it has been systematic.

Powerful US institutions have largely failed to hold the Trump administration accountable, analysts, such as Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University, said.

“His base of strong supporters are saying that they are willing to experience short-term increases in gasoline prices if it leads to a friendly government in Iran in the long term. His opponents have been his opponents on everything, so he simply ignores and threatens them,” Scheppele told Al Jazeera.

“Trump pays more attention to market performance than to public opinion, so he started saying that he was minimising costs and saying that the Iran war is short term to boost markets again.”

“What the US is spectacularly missing is leadership to oppose Trump. Congress is not doing its constitutional job to constrain him. The Supreme Court is in his pocket because he packed the court in his first term. Lower court judges are heroic and have done amazing work under serious pressures, but they don’t get foreign policy questions, given the difficulty of anyone getting ‘standing’ … in the area of international matters,” she said, referring to the requirement that parties to a lawsuit must show actual or future direct harm to themselves to bring a case to court.

She noted that lower federal courts, although limited on foreign policy, have repeatedly checked executive overreach on immigration, sanctions designations and emergency powers, often under intense political pressure.

The Galaxy Globe bulk carrier and the Luojiashan tanker sit anchored as Iran vows to close the Strait of Hormuz, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Muscat, Oman, March 9, 2026. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY — A bulk carrier and tanker at anchor in Muscat, Oman, as Iran has essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz by threatening to attack vessels transiting the waterway [File: Benoit Tessier/Reuters]

So why are so many people saying Trump’s war is faltering?

In the eyes of many observers, Trump, with no clear war aims or a defined resolution, is in danger of losing control of a conflict that appears to be both growing and reaching into economic areas apparently unforeseen by his administration, so while traditional restraints don’t apply, market forces, like gravity, always do.

Trump has repeatedly said the war would be over soon despite none of his claimed war aims being achieved.

Oil prices have surged due to his attacks on Iran, Tehran’s counterstrikes and threats to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes.

The International Energy Agency’s decision on Wednesday to release 400 million barrels of oil from international petroleum reserves has failed to tame the prices. Iran has warned that oil could hit $200 a barrel as it continues its stranglehold of the waterway.

“Ultimately, the factors that might be most likely to constrain Donald Trump’s neoimperialist impulses – or his willingness to pursue the policy goals of those who have his ear – are the economic fallout from disrupting global energy markets and a broader disenchantment among US voters with his globe-trotting militarism, his rampant self-dealing and his callous disregard for the human costs of war,” Becker said.

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POLITICS

Trump’s war rhetoric is coarse. It’s also heard differently, depending on the audience

Mar 15, 2026 Politics Desk

In one of his latest missives on social media, President Trump complained that he wasn’t getting enough credit for “totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise.”

“We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time,” he wrote of a war that has crippled the global supply of oil, sharply increased gas prices, cost U.S. taxpayers billions, left thousands dead and wounded, and so far defied Trump’s own “short term” timetable.

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” Trump added. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”

Again and again in recent days, Trump and other top officials in his administration — notably Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — have projected confidence and power in Iran in a coarse and triumphant tone that is unprecedented for U.S. wartime presidents and their Cabinet members, according to experts in presidential rhetoric and propaganda.

They have consistently described the war in terms of how hard the U.S. is hitting Iran, rather than why it must do so. They’ve talked of destroying the Iranian navy and air force, wiping out its leadership and making the U.S. “more respected” globally than it has ever been, including by showing no mercy.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be,” Hegseth said.

Missing is the solemnity of past wartime leaders facing dead U.S. soldiers, a recalcitrant enemy and a precarious tactical position, replaced by a message of U.S. mercilessness — of contempt for Iran rather than concern for its civilians or a focus on the American ideals that U.S. presidents have long tried to rally the world around, especially in times of war.

“At a time when people can see the effects of the war when they fill up their gas tank, and when there have been American casualties, the triumphalist tone is just not something a president normally does,” said Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of the book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”

“Many presidents wouldn’t have that tone for personal moral reasons,” Rowland said, “but they also know that it can backfire when things don’t go well.”

James J. Kimble, a communication professor and propaganda historian at Seton Hall University, said U.S. presidents have “by and large” struck a respectful tone in wartime, though there are some exceptions. President Truman, justifying dropping atomic bombs on Japan, wrote that “when you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast,” while the U.S. produced World War II posters designed to “demonize and dehumanize the German enemy,” he noted.

Still, Trump’s messaging — including his “expressing glee at the death of foreign combatants” — has been “much coarser,” Kimble said.

“It’s moving beyond the idea of defeating the enemy on the field of battle, and more into a kind of defeat as humiliation — intentional humiliation,” he said. “It’s schoolyard bullying, along with the physical violence.”

Asked about Trump’s rhetoric, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said Trump “will always be proud to recognize the incredible accomplishments of our brave service members.”

“Under the decisive leadership of President Trump, America’s heroic war fighters are meeting or surpassing all of their goals under Operation Epic Fury,” she said. “The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States military’s incredible success, but the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time.”

Trump has built his political career around blunt rhetoric, and his messaging on Iran has drawn applause from his supporters. Polling has shown the public is heavily divided on the war — drawing far less public support than past wars, but broad support from Republicans.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has accused the media of ignoring “clear” objectives that the president and others have set for the war effort, including wiping out Iran’s missile systems, preventing it from developing a nuclear weapon and stopping what Trump had a “feeling” was a coming attack on the U.S.

However, Trump and Hegseth have themselves strayed from that framework with their brash rhetoric, and their focus on the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian leaders.

Trump has dismissed reports that the U.S. bombed an Iranian school full of children by suggesting that Iran may actually have been responsible, despite reported findings by U.S. intelligence that it was an American attack.

Hegseth has added to concerns about careless U.S. bombing by expressing disdain for wartime rules designed to limit civilian casualties, calling them “stupid rules of engagement.”

“Our war fighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly,” Hegseth said. “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.”

The White House has also pushed out a wave of wartime propaganda on social media, often striking the same irreverent, bullish tone, experts noted.

One video interspersed movie clips of superheroes and soldiers with real footage of Iranian targets getting blown up, under the words, “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” The clip drew condemnation, including from the actor Ben Stiller, who objected to the inclusion of footage from his film “Tropic Thunder,” saying, “War is not a movie.”

Hegseth’s bravado has also been caricatured on “Saturday Night Live,” which opened two weeks in a row with a satirical portrayal of him as angry, dimwitted and hyped up on the violence of war.

All of it has come against a backdrop of Islamophobic remarks from members of Congress on X, with Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) writing that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) posting a picture of the 9/11 terrorist attack next to an image of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, and writing “the enemy is inside the gates.”

Certainly Iranian leaders have expressed similar contempt for the U.S. for years. Khamenei, killed at the start of the war, was known for stoking anti-American sentiment, speaking to crowds amid chants of “death to America.”

However, U.S. presidents have traditionally spoken with more reserve. They have slammed U.S. enemies, but often by drawing a contrast between them, the U.S. and the values the U.S. purports to defend globally. They have expressed confidence in past U.S. missions, but been wary of taking a celebratory or triumphant tone — especially at the start of a war, amid intense fighting, as American troops are still dying.

Not so with Trump, who on Wednesday said, “You never like to say too early you won. We won. We won … . In the first hour, it was over.”

He also said, “Over the past 11 days, our military has virtually destroyed Iran,” and “they don’t have anything.”

On Thursday, six U.S. service members were killed when a refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq. On Friday, the U.S. military announced it was sending 2,500 Marines and an additional U.S. warship to the conflict.

Kimble said there are several ways to view Trump’s war rhetoric. One is “through the lens of PSYOPS, or psychological operations” — or intentional messaging aimed at discouraging the enemy, akin to the U.S. dropping leaflets in World War II telling foreign combatants that they must surrender or die. In that view, Trump is speaking directly to the Iranians, trying to get them to “perceive victory as impossible.”

Another is to view Trump and Hegseth as projecting a tough image for their MAGA base, their Democratic rivals and any other nations they might be preparing to challenge, such as Cuba.

Rowland said Trump “always has to be the big dog in the room,” and his war messaging should be viewed in that context.

“A lot of the rhetoric is performative cruelty,” Rowland said. “It’s more about him coming across as dominant than it is about making a case that the war has been good for the U.S. and the region and the West and the world.”

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POLITICS

Column: Trump’s recklessness endangers the nation

Mar 12, 2026 Politics Desk

President Trump was uncommonly lucky in his first term, neither inheriting nor provoking a crisis of the sort that tests U.S. presidents, until COVID struck in his final 10 months. (He failed that test, contributing to his 2020 reelection defeat.) Trump 1.0 was bequeathed a growing economy from President Obama, and the incoming president assembled a roster of capable advisors who often acted to prevent him from doing nutty things at home and abroad.

Trump 2.0 made sure that no such human guardrails populated his second Cabinet, only genuflecting enablers. Unrestrained, he has presided over one crisis on top of another, all of his own making. Tariff mayhem and high prices. Armed agents and troops in American cities. Repeated violations of court orders. Demolition at federal agencies and the White House.

And now Trump has taken the nation to war against Iran in league with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Depending on the moment and the audience, a contradictory Trump is either claiming the war is “very complete” or that much remains to be done to “decimate” Iran. On Wednesday he blithely told Axios, “Any time I want it to end, it will end,” even as U.S. officials planned further actions.

In any case, Trump’s war of choice and the killing of the supreme leader of Iran’s terroristic theocracy now has spawned another potential crisis, counterterrorism experts warn: the risks of retaliatory terrorist threats at home. And that is a threat, whether from homegrown extremists or sleeper cells of the sort that came alive for 9/11, that is likely greater because of the initial self-induced crisis of Trump’s second term: his whacking of the federal government.

Trump authorized Elon Musk’s destruction of the bureaucracy in the name of “government efficiency” and continues to exact retribution against any federal employee who had anything to do with investigating and prosecuting him during his interregnum. Longtime agents and operatives have been eliminated at the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, CIA and elsewhere. Especially at the FBI, counterterrorism experts with centuries of collective experience are gone and many who remain have been diverted to Trump’s top priority: mass deportations.

Consequently, the president who promised to “Make America Safe Again” has arguably made Americans less safe.

I raised this scary prospect just over a year ago as Trump’s teardown of the purported Deep State was underway. And now a Mideast war that Trump promised never to start has further incentivized Iran and its jihadi proxies to hit back, just as he’s diminished the nation’s early-warning systems.

Enough intelligence remains, however, that even in the days before Trump ordered the first strikes against Tehran, government analysts were picking up “worrisome signs” of Iranian plotting against U.S. targets, the New York Times reported. After the U.S.-Israel onslaught and death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, the government intercepted a possible Iranian “operational trigger” to “sleeper assets” outside Iran, according to ABC News.

Counterterrorism expert Colin P. Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, which focuses on global security and transnational terrorism, wrote this week in the Atlantic that U.S. agencies’ record of disrupting Iranian-backed plots in America was in jeopardy given the recent changes in funding, personnel and priorities. “Because of this,” he concluded, “the U.S. homeland is arguably more vulnerable than it has been in a long time.”

In a follow-up exchange of emails, Clarke told me, “Many of this administration’s moves have been myopic — shifting counterterrorism resources to immigration, firing FBI agents working counterintelligence, etc. A week before the U.S. went to war with Iran, the FBI Director Kash Patel was off gallivanting in Milan at the Olympics [where he struggled to chug a Michelob Ultra, a firing offense in its own right] when he should have been preparing for the potential for an Iranian response on U.S. soil.”

Patel’s preposterous partying with the U.S. men’s hockey team while war-planning was underway in Washington was widely, justifiably mocked. But it stands as a metaphor for the entire Trump administration’s cavalier attitude toward homeland security. Its abusive focus on both migrants and citizens protesting on the migrants’ behalf is a distraction from actual threats to the country.

Patel, like his boss at the Justice Department, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, has made plain in words and actions that the president’s political enemies are the real public enemies No. 1. One of Bondi’s first acts was creation of a “weaponization working group” to identify, fire or prosecute those in her department who’d investigated and prosecuted Trump, many of whom also had experience in domestic and transnational terrorism. The association representing FBI agents called her purges “dangerous distractions” from the work “to make America safe again.”

Days after starting the Iran war, when homeland security should have been on red alert, Trump fired his secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. Her costly cosplaying as the homeland’s heroine on horseback in anti-migrant videos, along with her penchant for luxury jets allegedly to transport deportees, was too much even for him.

Yet all three “national security” officials — Noem, Bondi and Patel — simply reflect Trump’s own warped approach and blasé attitude toward the homefront.

When Time magazine last week asked the commander in chief whether Americans should be worried about potential terrorist strikes at home, he replied, “I guess.”

“We plan for it,” he added. “But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

The administration is planning for it all right. An extraordinary number of senior Trump officials have taken up residence in houses on military bases, including Bondi, Noem, the secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, and White House consigliere Stephen Miller.

The rest of us just have to keep our fingers crossed. I guess.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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POLITICS

Smartmatic says Trump’s ‘campaign of retribution’ is driving criminal prosecution

Mar 11, 2026 Politics Desk

MIAMI — Voting technology firm Smartmatic is seeking to dismiss a criminal indictment for money laundering, blaming President Trump and his allies for seeking its prosecution as part of a “campaign of retribution” against those they blame for his 2020 election loss.

Smartmatic’s parent company, UK-based SGO Corporation, was added to a criminal indictment last fall previously charging several executives with paying $1 million in bribes to election officials in the Philippines.

In a motion to dismiss the indictment filed Tuesday, attorneys for Smartmatic said the company had been cooperating with the Justice Department since it first learned of its investigation in 2021, including by producing millions of pages of documents and making presentations to federal agents. A trial date for the executives, including co-founder Roger Pinate, had been set and the company believed that it was in the clear.

But when Trump returned to the White House, the Justice Department reversed course and decided to press charges against Smartmatic. Attorneys for the company said the decision was prompted by Trump’s demands to prosecute his perceived enemies and his “mantra” that Smartmatic helped rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election won by Joe Biden — allegations that are at the heart of a $2.7-billion lawsuit filed by Smartmatic against the president’s allies in the media.

“The prosecution of SGO furthers their collective false narrative that President Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election,” Smartmatic said in the filing in Miami federal court.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Attorneys likened the prosecution to the Justice Department’s targeting of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a Salvadoran migrant who was criminally charged for conduct years earlier after he successfully sued the Trump administration over its decision to deport him.

In the years since the election, the filing states, “Smartmatic USA has exercised its right to hold those individuals and entities legally accountable for their deluge of defamatory statements and the attendant damage inflicts on its business, putting it squarely in the crosshairs for retribution.”

The criminal case against Smartmatic and its employees stems from payments, between 2015 and 2018, that were allegedly made to obtain a contract with the Philippine government to help run that country’s 2016 presidential election. Pinate, who no longer works for Smartmatic but remains a shareholder, has pleaded not guilty.

As part of the criminal case, prosecutors in August sought the court’s permission to introduce evidence they argue shows that revenue from a $300-million contract with Los Angeles County to help modernize its voting systems was diverted to a “ slush fund” controlled by Pinate through the use of overseas shell companies, fake invoices and other means.

They also accused Pinate of secretly bribing Venezuela’s longtime election chief by giving her a luxury home with a pool in Caracas. Prosecutors say the home was transferred to the election chief in an attempt to repair relations following Smartmatic’s abrupt exit from Venezuela in 2017 when it accused then-President Nicolas Maduro ’s government of manipulating tallied results in elections for a rubber-stamping constituent assembly.

Smartmatic was founded more than two decades ago by a group of Venezuelans who found early success running elections while the late Hugo Chavez, a devotee of electronic voting, was in power. The company later expanded globally, providing voting machines and other technology to help carry out elections in 25 countries, from Argentina to Zambia.

But Smartmatic has said its business tanked after Fox News gave Trump’s lawyers a platform to paint the company as part of a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.

Fox said it was legitimately reporting on newsworthy events but eventually aired a piece refuting the allegations after Smartmatic’s lawyers complained. Nonetheless, it has aggressively defended itself against the defamation lawsuit in New York — arguing that the company was facing imminent collapse over its own internal misconduct, not due to any negative coverage.

Goodman writes for the Associated Press.

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NEWS TODAY

Trump’s Iran Uranium Plan Risks a Wider War

Mar 10, 2026 News Desk

The reported idea of a special operation to seize Iran’s uranium should alarm anyone who still thinks there is a line between pressure and recklessness. Sending foreign forces into Iranian territory to capture nuclear material would be far beyond coercion. It would be war in plain sight. That risk looks even sharper when it is paired with talk of unconditional surrender and a revived maximum pressure campaign. Officials call that flexibility. In practice, it often creates confusion and a dangerous illusion of control.

Strategic Ambiguity Has Limits

Trump has long preferred threat inflation as a negotiating tool, and his administration’s National Security Presidential Memorandum on Iran makes clear that Washington wants to deny Tehran every path to a bomb. But there is a difference between pressure meant to shape diplomacy and rhetoric that drifts toward occupation logic. A raid assumes the United States can enter a sovereign state, take possession of fissile material, and leave without igniting a larger conflict. That is not strategy. It is a gamble.

A Raid Would Not Stay Small

Iran is not an isolated militia camp. It is a large state with layered security organs, missile capacity, regional partners, and a long memory of external intervention. Any attempt to seize uranium by force would expose American troops, bases, shipping lanes, diplomats, and partners to retaliation across several fronts. Even before talk of a raid, Washington and Tehran had been engaged in indirect nuclear talks in Oman. Replacing diplomacy with a ground mission would not create leverage. It would destroy what remains of a controlled bargaining space.

The Nuclear Picture Is Already Murky

The hardest fact in this debate is that the nuclear picture is already uncertain. In its February 2026 safeguards report, the IAEA said it could not verify the current status of facilities hit in June 2025. Reuters later highlighted that same report’s estimate that Iran had 440.9 kilograms enriched up to 60 percent before the strikes, while the Associated Press noted the wider stockpile had reached 9,874.9 kilograms of enriched uranium in total. Reuters also reported a cat-and-mouse hunt for missing material and confirmed that tunnel entrances at Isfahan were hit. Those facts do not make a commando operation look cleaner. They make it look less knowable.

Force Has Already Damaged Oversight

This is the contradiction hawks avoid. Military action may damage buildings, but it can also damage the inspection system needed to track what survives. The IAEA chief said that returning to Iranian sites was the top priority after the attacks because the agency had lost visibility. Reuters warned even before the war that any new Iran deal would have to address serious watchdog blind spots. Rafael Grossi had already reminded the Security Council that nuclear facilities must never be attacked and later stressed that inspectors must be allowed to do their job. Once oversight is broken, claims about perfect control become less credible.

Pressure Without Diplomacy Can Harden Iran

Advocates of seizure argue that urgency changes the rules. Their point is easy to grasp. If material has been moved, hidden, or split across sites, then delay is dangerous. But urgency cuts both ways. The less certainty there is, the more any raid grows in scope. A supposedly limited mission can quickly expand into repeated searches, broader strikes, and pressure for a longer presence. That trajectory sits uneasily with both the basic ban on the use of force in the UN Charter and the logic of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which depends on verification and compliance, not theatrical confiscation. Reuters has also shown that the damage from earlier strikes was difficult to measure and that U.S. officials later said there was no known intelligence that Iran had moved the uranium. That uncertainty is exactly why fantasies of a clean raid should be treated with suspicion.

Containment Is Less Dramatic, but Safer

There is another reason to reject this path. Public overstatement can create policy traps. Trump has already brushed aside internal caution, including when Reuters reported that he said his own intelligence chief was wrong about Iran’s program. Tehran, for its part, has insisted through officials speaking to Reuters that it will not give up enrichment under pressure. That is not a recipe for surrender. It is a recipe for concealment and hardening. Serious policy should focus on intelligence work, restored IAEA access, sustained diplomatic pressure backed by credible penalties, and a clear effort to prevent a regional war that would leave the uranium question even murkier.

The appeal of seizure is obvious. It sounds decisive and final. But nuclear crises rarely yield to cinematic solutions. They are managed through verification, containment, bargaining, and steady pressure, not through fantasies of absolute control. If this idea is truly being weighed in Washington, it should be rejected before rhetoric turns into mission planning. A ground effort to capture uranium inside Iran would not settle the problem. It could widen the war, shatter what diplomacy still exists, and leave the world with the same material, less oversight, and far more bloodshed.

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POLITICS

Trump’s ‘roaring’ economy meets a rough start to 2026: What the latest numbers show

Mar 8, 2026 Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — President Trump promised that 2026 would be a bumper year for economic growth, but instead it has kicked off with job losses, rising gasoline prices and more uncertainty about America’s future.

In his State of the Union address less than two weeks ago, the Republican president confidently told the country: “The roaring economy is roaring like never before.” The latest batch of data on jobs, pump prices and the stock market suggests that Trump’s roar has started to sound far more like a whimper.

There is a gap between the boom that Trump has predicted and the volatile results he has produced — one that could set the tone in this year’s midterm elections as he tries to defend his party’s majorities in the House and Senate. With Trump’s tariffs uncertainty ongoing, the war in Iran has suddenly created inflationary concerns regarding oil and natural gas.

The White House says it is still early in the year and stronger growth is coming.

No signs of a jobs boom

“WOW! The Golden Age of America is upon us!!!” Trump posted on social media Feb. 11 after the monthly jobs report showed gains of 130,000 jobs in January.

Since then, the job market has evaporated in worrisome ways.

Friday’s employment report showed job losses of 92,000 in February. The January and December figures were revised downward, with December swinging to a loss of 17,000 jobs. Monthly data can be rocky, but a trend has emerged that shows an enduring weakness. Without the healthcare sector, the economy would have shed roughly 202,000 jobs since Trump became president in January 2025. His administration notes construction job gains outside of the housing sector, which it says point to future hiring growth.

Trump often claims that jobs are going to people born in the United States, rather than to immigrants. But the latest report punctured some of that argument.

The unemployment rate for people born in the U.S. has climbed over the last 12 months to 4.7% from 4.4%. This means a greater share of the people who Trump said would get jobs because of his immigration crackdown are, in fact, searching for work.

Prices at the pump are going up

“Slashing energy costs is among the most important actions we can take to bring down prices for American consumers,” Trump said in a February speech in Texas just before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. “Because when you cut the cost of energy, you really cut — you just cut the cost of everything.”

The president has repeatedly told Americans that keeping gas costs low would be key to defeating inflation. He has talked up the decline, citing figures that were far below the national average to persuade the public that driving was getting cheaper.

But the strikes against Iran that began Feb. 28 have, for the moment, crushed that narrative. Prices at the pump have jumped 19% over the last month to a national average of $3.45, according to AAA. The investment bank Goldman Sachs warned in an analyst note that, if higher oil prices persist, inflation could rise from its 2.4% reading in January to 3% by the end of the year.

The administration is banking on plans to contain any energy price increases, essentially betting that either the conflict will end shortly or the administration can succeed in getting more tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump advisors on Sunday sought to assure anxious Americans that surging fuel prices are a short-term problem.

“We never know exactly the timeframe of this,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNN’s “State of the Union. “But in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing.”

Stocks are off their highs

“You know, we set the all-time record in history with the Dow going to 50,000,” Trump said Thursday at the White House.

This frequently repeated talking point has grown stale. The Dow Jones industrial average, one of Trump’s preferred measures of success, has dropped 5% over the last month. Stocks are up during his presidency, just as they were when Democrat Joe Biden was president. The recent decline could be reversed if the war with Iran ends and companies see solid profits over the next year and beyond. The recent dip, however, should be a warning sign as the administration has stressed the importance of more people investing in the stock market through vehicles such as “Trump accounts” for children.

The stock market has become a barometer of how people feel about the economy, with stock investors tending to have more confidence and those without money in the markets being more pessimistic.

Joanna Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers, noted that in February a “sizable” increase in sentiment among people owning stocks “was fully offset by a decline among consumers without stock holdings.”

Productivity is up, but workers aren’t benefiting

Trump can point to a win in that the economy has become more productive — generating more value for each hour of work. That is a positive sign for long-term growth in the U.S. and a reflection of its strong tech sector.

Business sector labor productivity climbed 2.8% in the fourth quarter of last year, the Labor Department reported Thursday. But the challenge is that the gains might not be spread to workers in the form of higher pay as labor’s share of income last year fell to the lowest level on record, noted Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project, a nonprofit aligned with liberal economic issues.

Economy grew at a faster pace under Biden

“Under the Biden administration, America was plagued by the nightmare of stagflation, meaning low growth and high inflation — a recipe for misery, failure and decline,” Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

The scoreboard tells a far different story, one that makes Biden’s track record in 2024 look better than Trump’s performance last year. The U.S. economy grew at a 2.8% pace during Biden’s last year, compared with 2.2% under Trump in 2025.

As for inflation, the primary measure used by the Federal Reserve is the personal consumption expenditures price index. It was 2.6% in both 2024 and 2025.

Trump has staked his economic argument on doing better than Biden. But while he has avoided the inflation spikes that haunted Biden’s presidency — amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — Trump has not delivered stronger growth or more hiring.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

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POLITICS

What is Trump’s true objective in the Iran war? U.S. targets provide a clue

Mar 8, 2026 Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department last week outlined a concise set of military objectives in President Trump’s war against Iran, claiming its ultimate goal is to dismantle Tehran’s ability to project power beyond its borders. Yet it may be targets the Pentagon has largely left unacknowledged that offer the clearest insight yet into Trump’s true intentions.

U.S. military strikes have focused on Iran’s ballistic missile, drone and nuclear programs, as well as its naval assets, according to U.S. Central Command. But strikes have also increasingly targeted Iran’s internal security forces, used by the Islamic Republic to suppress public dissent, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project shared with The Times.

The strikes have targeted at least 123 headquarters, barracks and local bases operated by Iran’s paramilitary organizations, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij militia. Regional police forces, primarily in the capital region around Tehran and in western Iran, near areas dominated by Kurdish groups hostile to the Iranian government, have also been targeted.

Map of Iran shown air strikes and reported explosions.

Some of those groups are being armed and supported by the U.S. intelligence community, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

Nicholas Carl, with the Critical Threats Project, said the pattern indicates the campaign is already underway to set the conditions for a revolution.

“As we are going after these repressive institutions, we are degrading the ability of the regime to monitor its population, to repress its population,” Carl said. “And so it looks as though the strike campaign may be organized around trying to erode the ability of the regime to repress in those areas.”

Analysts said that strikes against internal forces could be greater than they have measured thus far, noting the difficulty of tracking targets in the war based on publicly available data due to an internet blackout strictly enforced by the Iranian government.

The quieter side of the U.S. campaign suggests a political strategy by the Trump administration that goes beyond simply containing the Iranian government, and may instead aim to lay the groundwork for its overthrow.

Trump and his top aides have been inconsistent in their messaging on their goals for the war, vacillating between calls for regime change and far shorter ambitions, such as an Islamic Republic that remains in power under leadership more acquiescent to the United States.

Before the war began, Trump was presented with an intelligence assessment that large-scale military action was unlikely to topple the Iranian government, two sources familiar with the assessment said. The assessment led analysts at the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon all to advise the White House against proceeding with the operation. The intelligence analysis was first reported by the Washington Post.

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Greasing the wheels for domestic unrest, for insurgency or revolution could serve other strategic purposes for the Trump administration beyond effecting regime change, adding new sources of pressure on an Islamic Republic that, if still intact by war’s end, would face renewed internal pressures at a moment of historic weakness.

Rob Malley, lead negotiator on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and special U.S. envoy for Iran under President Biden, said that a sustained U.S. campaign that cripples Iran’s ability to maintain domestic control could mean “the regime collapses, in the sense that it can no longer, genuinely and effectively, govern the entirety of the country.”

“Right now, what Trump is saying suggests an extremely ambitious, extremely long-term, extremely perilous campaign that will only end with Iran’s surrender, and it’s very hard to see Iran surrendering,” Malley said. But the campaign may already be working. “Their communications have certainly been penetrated — they cannot meet without being targeted by Israel or the United States,” he added.

A women holds a portrait of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a protest

“Either the regime stays in place weakened, bloodied, finding it harder to govern a more fragmented, chaotic country,” Malley continued, “or the regime no longer can govern.”

An Israeli official did not deny that internal security forces were being targeted, although the official said that Israel was focused on assassinating Iran’s political and security leadership — “tiers one, two and three,” the official said. The vast majority of the strikes against internal security services thus far have been conducted by the United States.

“Our goal is to weaken the ayatollah regime, to a point where the Iranian people can choose their fate,” the official told The Times. “It’s still not at the point where they can do that, but there is work still to be done.”

By all accounts, the campaign against Iran’s military assets has achieved success. Iranian ballistic missile attacks against Israel and U.S. forces and allies in the region have decreased by 90% after just a week of combat, Defense officials said. Drone strikes have decreased by 83%. Over 30 Iranian vessels, including those used as launching pads for drones and aircraft, have been destroyed — a significant number for Iran’s aged and ill-funded naval fleet.

Trump could simply declare victory based on these results alone, said Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative for Iran in 2020.

“They will get weaker as they use up resources and we bomb more and more relevant sites. Already air traffic is starting up again,” Abrams said, noting that commercial flights in the region began resuming this weekend. “So I doubt that the president will need a protracted campaign.”

But that would leave the regime in place, leaving open the possibility of a revanchist Islamic Republic that could reconstitute its military and crack down further on democratic protesters — an outcome that could create political backlash for Trump, Abrams said, after losing U.S. service members in combat.

A woman jogs along a street amid closed shops

“The outcome remains entirely in doubt — regime collapse after a wave of protests, civil war, a deal that leaves the regime in place behind a new face,” Abrams added. “A real test for Trump would arise if there is a wave of protests as in January, and the regime again starts shooting. Can he do nothing? Unlikely.”

In his initial speech announcing the start of the campaign, Trump addressed the people of Iran, telling them to shelter in their homes until the U.S. bombing campaign concludes.

“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” the president said. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond.”

But the president’s message grew muddled over the course of the last week, after he offered conflicting goals in a series of interviews with reporters.

He at once said he was expecting to hand-select the next ayatollah, after assassinating Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the opening salvo of the war. In other interviews, he said that the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign had killed many of the potential leaders that Washington could have worked with.

On Friday, Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” He did not specify whether he was referring to a surrender of Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile program, or on control over the country itself, and in a subsequent interview, said it could simply mean “when Iran no longer has the ability to fight.”

Over the last week, Kurdish leaders have shared accounts of Trump and his top aides reaching out to them and encouraging their involvement in the war, including a ground incursion in western Iran from Iraqi Kurdistan. But the president seems to have placed that effort on hold for the time being. “The war is complicated enough without having — getting the Kurds involved,” he told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One.

At Central Command headquarters on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that Trump maintains his promise to the Iranian people at the outset of the war, that a time will come for an uprising.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addresses the audience as President Trump listens

“No one’s done more than President Trump to reopen the opportunity for those who want a free Iran to do so,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, it’s common sense, as he said up front, don’t go out and protest while bombs are dropping inside Tehran and elsewhere. There will come a moment where he determines, or they determine, that it’s time to seize that advantage.”

Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Iran, said she expects the government to survive the U.S. assault, “still easily able to outgun and outmaneuver any challenges from the streets.”

But a concerted, prolonged campaign could change that assessment.

“Of course, months of full-scale war certainly could also break the system,” Maloney said, adding: “I don’t think the short-term result would be a stable transition to a more liberal system — but rather a collapse of the state itself, and at least for some period of time, a dangerous vacuum of power and order in the heart of the Middle East.”

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POLITICS

Trump’s remarks about the parents of a fallen Army captain become the latest trouble spot in his campaign

Mar 8, 2026 Politics Desk

Reporting from Washington — The father of an Army captain who died a hero in Iraq looked incredulous.

Donald Trump had seemed to criticize his wife on national television, suggesting that her Muslim faith might be the reason she stayed silent during the couple’s high-profile appearance at the Democratic National Convention last week, when Khizr Khan criticized the GOP presidential nominee.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Khan said his wife was simply too grief-stricken to speak that night. Then the father said something that may sum up Trump’s biggest challenge between now and November: “He had to take that shot at her.”

Trump has built an unlikely presidential campaign on his combative style and language. He can’t seem to resist taking a shot or responding to an attack, even when the political fight seems unwinnable.

That instinct arguably has served Trump well so far, allowing him to win a crowded Republican primary and stay competitive in national polls with Hillary Clinton.

But it has also caused him unneeded political wounds, playing into the Clinton campaign’s argument that he lacks the temperament to lead the country and sometimes stealing attention from Clinton’s own political liabilities.

The public feud with the Khans looks to stir up the biggest self-inflicted controversy since Trump criticized a federal judge in a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. Trump repeatedly questioned the judge’s ability to be fair because his parents were born in Mexico.

The Khan flap may also linger because Trump’s words were directed at grieving parents whose son died while serving the United States, rather than the politicians he usually targets.

“It violates almost every hallmark of traditional politics, but I guess that’s Donald Trump,” said Reed Galen, a veteran Republican consultant who is not supporting Trump or Hillary Clinton. “The way to get to a guy like Trump — and the Hillary campaign is now finally understanding this — this is a guy who can’t let slights, major or minor, go by.”

Trump’s puzzling engagement with the Khans not only inspired an unusually pointed rebuke from Clinton on Sunday, it also sparked broad condemnation from many Republicans.

For much of the weekend, Trump found himself squaring off against the Khans, whose convention appearance was an emotional high point for many Democrats. During the last night of the convention, Khizr Khan, his wife, Ghazala, beside him, recounted the loss of their son, Humayun. Then he questioned Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., pulling out a pocket Constitution and asking whether Trump had even read the document.

Trump could have let the moment pass, or simply praised their sacrifice without confronting them, as other politicians have done when met by military families who have rendered the highest sacrifice.

See the most-read stories in National News this hour >>

Instead, Trump, in an ABC interview broadcast Sunday, said Khizr Khan looked like a “nice guy,” but he questioned why Ghazala Khan did not speak during the convention, saying “maybe she wasn’t allowed to.”

He pushed back against Khizr Khan’s assertion that Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country would have kept his son out. “He doesn’t know that,” Trump said. Then the businessman, who avoided the draft during the Vietnam War, said he too had made “sacrifices,” citing his hiring of “thousands and thousands of people.”

After the ABC transcript from the taped interview was released Saturday, Trump’s campaign attempted to correct course. In a statement released late Saturday, Trump called Humayun Khan “a hero to our country” and said “the real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him.”

Yet he still could not resist keeping the fight alive.

“While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan, who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things,” Trump added.

On Sunday, as the controversy festered, Trump complained on Twitter that “I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention.”

“Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!” he said.

The Khans proved formidable and sympathetic foes as they granted multiple rounds of nationally televised interviews. Ghazala Khan wrote an emotional essay Sunday for the Washington Post, recounting her 12 years of grief since her son died, her inability to enter a room where his picture is displayed because of the pain, and the fact that she could not even bring herself to clean out his closet.

“I don’t think he knows the meaning of sacrifice, the meaning of the word,” Ghazala Khan said of Trump on ABC. “Because when I was standing there, all of America felt my pain. Without saying a single word. Everybody felt that pain, but I don’t know how he missed that.”

While trying to remain above the partisan swamp, they looked shaken yet defiant — casting Trump as someone who lacks a moral compass and the capability for empathy. They challenged Republican leaders to denounce Trump.

As the pressure simmered, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement of support for the Khans, saying he agreed “that a travel ban on all members of a religion is simply contrary to American values.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan also called out Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim travel and praised the “many Muslim Americans [who] have served valiantly in our military, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Capt. Khan was one such brave example. His sacrifice — and that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan — should always be honored. Period.”

Other Republicans were even more forceful.

“There’s only one way to talk about Gold Star parents: with honor and respect,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who lost to Trump in the primary and has withheld his endorsement, wrote on Twitter. “Capt. Khan is a hero. Together, we should pray for his family.” (Gold Stars are awarded to the family members of soldiers who die serving in the U.S. armed forces.)

Tim Miller, a former aide to Mitt Romney, wrote on Twitter that Trump’s words were a “grotesque slander of a dead soldier.” He contrasted them with George W. Bush’s response to an antiwar protest in 2005 by Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq.

“I grieve at every death,” an emotional Bush said at the height of the protest. “It breaks my heart to think about a family weeping over the loss of a loved one.”

Bush said he recognized and thought about the “sincere desire” of those who wanted to pull out of Iraq while laying out his case to keep troops there.

Clinton faced a similar question Sunday on Fox News. She was asked about the assertion by two parents who lost their sons in the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, that Clinton had come to them on the day their bodies were returned to the United States and claimed their deaths were the result of an inflammatory video, rather than terrorism.

“My heart goes out to both of them,” she said, bemoaning their loss and praising them as “extraordinary men.”

“As other members of families who lost loved ones have said, that’s not what they heard — I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said,” Clinton added.

Clinton spoke directly about the controversy later Sunday at a church in Ohio.

“Mr. Khan paid the ultimate sacrifice in his family, didn’t he? And what has he heard from Donald Trump?” Clinton said. “Nothing but insults, degrading comments about Muslims, a total misunderstanding of what made our country great — religious freedom, religious liberty.”

Clinton has made Trump’s reactive style central to her critique. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” she said during her convention speech.

Even in defending against that charge, Trump showed his instinct to counterpunch, something many of his supporters admire.

“She’s a very dishonest person. I have one of the great temperaments,” he said on ABC. “I have a winning temperament. She has a bad temperament. She’s weak. We need a strong temperament.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, blamed the controversy on Clinton, a tactic he has used after previous blowups.

“This is the Clinton narrative,” Manafort said on NBC, when asked about Trump’s comments about Khan. “Mr. Trump, of course, feels sorry for what the Khan family has gone through.”

The controversy came just a few days after another headline-grabbing moment, when Trump on Wednesday effectively baited Russia to hack Clinton’s old email account to try to recover more than 30,000 emails she deleted from the private server she used when she was secretary of State.

“He’s going off down these rabbit trails,” said Ron Nehring, a former national spokesman for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and former chairman of the California Republican Party. “Every day that is spent on these manufactured non-issues is another day he is not training fire on Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities.”

Such controversies tend to overshadow issues that might otherwise gain broader attention, experts say, such as Friday’s disappointing economic growth figures.

During Sunday’s interview with ABC, for example, Trump tried to sidestep questions about his failure to release his tax returns and raised concerns about the timing of three upcoming presidential debates, complaining that two dates overlap with NFL games.

Times staff writer Chris Megerian in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

noah.bierman@latimes.com

Twitter: @noahbierman

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UPDATES:

3:15 p.m.: The story was updated with additional reaction.

The story was originally published at 12:15 p.m.

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POLITICS

Donald Trump’s complete convention speech, annotated

Mar 7, 2026 Politics Desk

Times journalists are annotating this speech. If you see a passage highlighted in yellow, you can click on it to see what we have to say about it. You can also highlight passages and leave your own comments.

Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Who would’ve believed that when we started this journey on June 16, last year, we and I say we, because we are a team, would have received almost 14 million votes, the most in the history of the Republican Party, and that the Republican Party would get 60% more votes than it received eight years ago. Who would’ve believed this? Who would’ve believed this? The Democrats on the other hand, received 20% fewer votes than they got four years ago, not so good, not so good.

Full convention coverage »

Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity and peace. We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.

Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.

Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims.

I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end. Beginning on January 20^th, 2017, safety will be restored.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation.

I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore. So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully crafted lies and the media myths, the Democrats are holding their convention next week. Go there.

But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.

These are the facts:

Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.

Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s 50 largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50%. They’re up nearly 60% in nearby Baltimore.

In the president’s hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 people have been the victim of shootings this year alone. And almost 4,000 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office.

The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50% compared to this point last year. Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.

The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.

One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root. She was 21 years old and was killed the day after graduating from college with a 4.0 grade point average, No. 1 in her class. Her killer was then released a second time, and he is now a fugitive from the law.

I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family. But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. No more. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders.

What about our economy? Again, I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper: Nearly 4 in 10 African American children are living in poverty, while 58% of African American youth are now not employed. Two million more Latinos are in poverty today than when President Obama took his oath of office less than eight years ago. Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.

Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000. That’s 16 years ago. Our manufacturing trade deficit has reached an all-time high. Think of this, think of this: Our trade deficit is nearly $800 billion last year alone. We’re gonna fix that.

The budget is no better. President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. And yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are Third World condition, and 43 million Americans are on food stamps.

Now let us consider the state of affairs abroad.

Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they’ve lived through one international humiliation after another. One after another. We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint.

This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us absolutely nothing. It will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever negotiated. Another humiliation came when President Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant absolutely nothing.

In Libya, our consulate – the symbol of American prestige around the globe – was brought down in flames. America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy. Let’s defeat her in November.

I am certain it is a decision President Obama truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused the disasters unfolding today. Let’s review the record. In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map.

Libya was stable. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing and really a big, big reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was somewhat under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have?

Trump paints a grim portrait of the U.S. and casts himself as its only savior in GOP acceptance speech »

ISIS has spread across the region, and the entire world. Libya is in ruins, and our ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos.

Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war, and a refugee crisis now threatens the West. After 15 years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness.

But Hillary Clinton’s legacy does not have to be America’s legacy. The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place. A change in leadership is required to produce a change in outcomes. Tonight, I will share with you my plan for action for America.

The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponent, is that our plan will put America first. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America first, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. The respect that we deserve.

The American people will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order. On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.

A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation’s most powerful special interests. That’s because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit. Believe me, it’s for their benefit.

Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over every single thing she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.

That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. Never ever. My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored and abandoned.

I have visited the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. And they are forgotten, but they’re not gonna be forgotten long.

These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.

I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice.

How great are our police, and how great is Cleveland? Thank you.

I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, of which there is so much, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens.

When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will or the courage or the basic decency to enforce our laws – or worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash – I am not able to look the other way.

And when a secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country.

When the FBI director says that the secretary of State was “extremely careless” and “negligent” in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible, terrible crimes.

In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it – especially when others who have done far less have paid so dearly. When that same secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers, I know the time for action has come.

I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance.

But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: trade deals that strip our country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of Democrats will join our movement too because we are going to fix the system so it works fairly and justly for each and every American. In this cause, I am proud to have at my side the next vice president of the United States: Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana. And a great guy.

We will bring the same economic success to America that Mike brought to Indiana. Which is amazing. He is a man of character and accomplishment. He is the man for the job. The first task for our new administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens our communities.

America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were so brutally executed. Immediately after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan and Tennessee.

On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and three were very, very badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me, believe me.

I will work with, and appoint, the best and brightest prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job properly done. In this race for the White House, I am the law-and-order candidate. The irresponsible rhetoric of our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.

This administration has failed America’s inner cities. It’s failed them on education. It’s failed them on jobs. It’s failed them in crime. It’s failed them in every way and on every single level.

When I am president, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally and protected equally.

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Every action I take, I will ask myself: Does this make better for young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson who really in every way have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child in America? As any other child?

To make life safe for all of our citizens, we must also address the growing threats we face from outside America. We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS and we’re going to defeat them fast. Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic terrorism.

Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in mourning.

The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been proven over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon and a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and many, many other locations.

Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted LGBTQ community. No good, and we’re gonna stop it. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. Believe me.

And I have to say, as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said. Thank you.

To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things.

We must have the best, absolutely the best gathering of intelligence anywhere in the world. The best. We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and in Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terrorism and doing it now, doing it quickly, we’re going to win, we’re going to win fast.

This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the state of Israel.

Recently, I have said that NATO was obsolete. Because it did not properly cover terrorism. And also, that many of the member countries were not paying their fair share. As usual, the United States has been picking up the cost. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that NATO will be setting up a new program in order to combat terrorism. A true step in the right direction.

Lastly, and very importantly, we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place. We don’t want them in our country.

My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian — think of this, think of this, this is not believable but this is what’s happening — a 550% increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country already under the leadership of President Obama. She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.

Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country and never ever will be.

Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.

On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants. Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden and my friend Jamiel Shaw. They’re just three brave representatives of many thousands who have suffered so gravely. Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more, nothing even close I have to tell you, than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our borders. Which we can solve. We have to solve it.

These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protect them and certainly none to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain, believe me. Instead, my opponent wants sanctuary cities. But where was the sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann and Sabine and Jamiel? Where was sanctuary for all of, aw, it’s so sad to even be talking about it, because we can solve it so quickly. Where was the sanctuary for the other Americans who have been so brutally murdered and who have suffered so horribly?

These wounded American families have been alone. But they are not alone any longer. Tonight, this candidate and the whole nation stand in their corner to support them, to send them our love and to pledge in their honor that we will save countless more families from suffering and the same awful fate.

We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. I have been honored to receive the endorsement of America’s border patrol agents, and will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful, lawful, lawful immigration system. Lawful.

By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will end the cycle of human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down. We will stop it. It won’t be happening very much any more, believe me. Peace will be restored. By enforcing the rules for millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect that they deserve.

All Things Trump »

Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied – and every politician who has denied them – to listen very, very closely to the words I am about to say.

On January 20th of 2017, the day I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone.

But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens. USA, USA, USA. My plan is the exact opposite of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Which is what we have now. Communities want relief.

Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration and mass lawlessness. Her plan will overwhelm your schools and hospitals, further reduce your jobs and wages, and make it harder for recent immigrants to escape the tremendous cycle of from poverty that they’re going through right now, and make it almost impossible for them to join the middle class.

I have a different vision for our workers. It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat, of which there are many. It’s been a signature message of my campaign from Day One, and it will be a signature feature of my presidency from the moment I take the oath of office.

I have made billions of dollars in business making deals – now I’m going to make our country rich again. Using the greatest business people in the world, which our country has, I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements. America has lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country or frankly any other country.

Never ever again.

I am going to bring our jobs to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and Michigan and all of America – and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequence. Not gonna happen anymore.

My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization – another one of her husband’s colossal mistakes and disasters.

She supported the job-killing trade deal with South Korea. She supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will not only destroy our manufacturing, but it will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments. And it’s not going to happen. I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom or our independence. We will never, ever sign these trade deals. America first again. America first.

Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries.

Balloons drop at the end of the the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

No longer will we enter into these massive transactions, with many countries, that are thousands of pages long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade violations against any country that cheats.

This includes stopping China’s outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. They are the greatest that ever came about, they are the greatest currency manipulators ever.

Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America – and we’ll walk away if we don’t get that kind of a deal. Our country is going to start building and making things again.

Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans a massive, and I mean massive, tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has run for president this year – Democrat or Republican. Middle-income Americans and businesses will experience profound relief, and taxes will be greatly simplified for everyone. And I mean everyone.

America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world. Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Believe me, it’ll happen and it’ll happen fast. Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it very, very quickly. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy. This will produce more than $20 trillion in job creating economic activity over the next four decades.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

My opponent, on the other hand, wants to put the great miners and the great steelworkers of our country out of work and out of business. That will never happen when I am president. Our steelworkers and our miners are going back to work again. With these new economic policies, trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country.

This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans. We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports and the railways of tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions of more jobs. We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice.

My opponent would rather protect bureaucrats than serve American children. And that’s what she’s doing, and that’s what she’s done.

We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again.

And we will fix TSA at the airports! Which is a total disaster. Thank you, thank you.

We’re going to work with all of our students who are drowning in debt to take the pressure off these people just starting out in their adult lives. Tremendous problem.

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We will completely rebuild our depleted military. And the countries that we are protecting, at a massive cost to us, will be asked to pay their fair share.

We will take care of our great veterans like they have never been taken care of before. My just released 10-point plan has received tremendous veterans’ support. We will guarantee those who serve this country will be able to visit the doctor or hospital of their choice without waiting five days on a line and dying.

My opponent dismissed the VA scandal – one more sign of how out of touch she really is. We are going to ask every department head in government to provide a list of wasteful spending on projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days. The politicians have talked about this for years, but I’m going to do it.

We are going to appoint justices of the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our laws and our Constitution.

The replacement of our beloved Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views, principles and judicial philosophies. Very important. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election.

My opponent wants to essentially abolish the 2nd Amendment. I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National Rifle Assn. and will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.

At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical and religious community because I’ll tell you what, the support they’ve given me, and I’m not sure I totally deserve it, has been so awesome and has had such a big reason for me being here tonight. True, so true.

They have much to contribute to our politics, yet our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits.

An amendment which, by Lyndon Johnson, many years ago, threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views. I am going to work very hard to repeal that language and protect free speech for all Americans.

We can accomplish these great things, and so much more – all we need to do is start believing in ourselves and in our country again. It is time to show the whole world that America is back – bigger and better and stronger than ever before.

In this journey, I’m so lucky to have at my side my wife Melania and my wonderful children Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany and Barron. You will always be my greatest source of pride and joy. And by the way, Melania and Ivanka, did they do a job. My dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest-working man I ever knew. I wonder sometimes what he’d say if he were here to see this and to see me tonight.

It’s because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers and carpenters,and electricians. And I have a lot of that in me also. I love those people. Then there’s my mother, Mary. She was strong but also warm and fair-minded. She was a truly great mother. She was also one of the most honest and charitable people that I have ever known, and a great, great judge of character. She could pick ’em out from anywhere.

To my sisters Mary Anne and Elizabeth, my brother Robert and my late brother Fred, I will always give you my love. You are most special to me.

I have had a truly great life in business. But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country – to go to work for all of you. It’s time to deliver a victory for the American people. We don’t win anymore, but we’re going to start winning again! But to do that, we must break free from the petty politics of the past.

America is a nation of believers, dreamers and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics and cynics.

Remember: All of the people telling you you can’t have the country you want are the same people telling you that wouldn’t stand. I mean they said Trump doesn’t stand a chance of being here tonight, not a chance. The same people. Oh, we love defeating those people don’t we. We love defeating them. Love it, love it. No longer can we rely on those elites in media and politics who will say anything to keep our rigged system in place.

Instead, we must choose to believe In America. History is watching us now. We don’t have much time. But history is watching. It’s waiting to see if we will rise to the occasion, and if we will show the whole world that America is still free and independent and strong.

I am asking for you to support tonight so that I can be your champion in the White House. And I will be your champion. My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: “I’m With Her.” I choose to recite a different pledge.

My pledge reads: “I’m With You – The American People.”

I am your voice.

So to every parent who dreams for their child and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I am with you. I will fight for you, and I will win for you.

To all Americans tonight, in all of our cities and all of our towns, I make this promise: We will make America strong again.

We will make America proud again.

We will make America safe again.

And we will make America great again.

God bless you and goodnight. I love you.

Twitter: @latimespolitics

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POLITICS

Panel reviewing Trump’s White House ballroom project will vote on it April 2

Mar 5, 2026 Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — A federal panel reviewing President Trump’s plans to build a ballroom at the White House has set April 2 for a final vote on the project, the chairman said as the agency prepared to give additional consideration to the construction plans.

Will Scharf, chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission and a top aide to the Republican president, made the announcement Thursday at the start of the panel’s March meeting.

The panel will hear additional details about the project from the White House as well as its own staff, and had been expected to vote on Thursday.

But Scharf announced that the vote was switched to April to give every member of the public who wants to comment a chance to do so. More than 100 people had signed up to comment at Thursday’s meeting, which was being conducted online as a result.

The panel has also been flooded with scores of written comments about Trump’s plans to build a 90,000-square-foot addition where the East Wing of the White House once stood. Trump has said it will cost about $400 million and be paid for with private money. Trump had the East Wing demolished in October.

Scharf said the meeting was being conducted online to ease the public testimony portion, which he said was likely to extend into Friday given the number of people who had signed up to speak.

“They are taking time out of what I presume are busy schedules to join us,” he said. “One way or the other, we are going to make sure that members of the public have the opportunity to be heard on this project.”

Critics of the project have argued that Trump should not have demolished the East Wing until the National Capital Planning Commission and a separate panel, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, had reviewed and voted on his plans. The fine arts panel approved the project last month.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private, nonprofit group, asked a federal judge to temporarily halt construction until the White House submitted the plans both to federal panels and to Congress for approval, and allowed the public to comment.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rejected the request last week, and the trust has said it plans to file an amended lawsuit.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

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POLITICS

Column: On Iran, Russia and China, Trump’s weakness for strongmen explains his foreign policy

Mar 5, 2026 Politics Desk

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
— Donald Trump, in his victory speech Nov. 6, 2024

It’s bad enough that President Trump has broken that oft-repeated pledge and unilaterally started a war, without engaging either Congress or the American public. And that, by his war of choice against Iran, he has in the most perilous way to date betrayed his signature “America First” standard, at least as longtime proponents Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and others mean it, and as many people thought he did too.

What’s even worse than Trump’s mendacity about stopping foreign wars is the broader truth that his war on Iran underscores: In the major theaters of U.S. foreign policy — the Mideast, Europe and Asia — he is essentially letting foreigners set his course, America’s course. And to state the obvious: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping do not have America’s interests at heart.

It has long been a defining contradiction of Trump that the wannabe strongman repeatedly shows himself to be in thrall to the world’s actual strongmen. His affinity for them has for years puzzled observers in this country and abroad. Trump strikes a pose — say, on negotiating with Iran about its nukes program, promising peace in Ukraine, hitting China with tariffs — only to crumple after a phone call, a meeting or a slap back from his opposite number.

It’s always hard for a person without a strong core to maintain a stand.

Obviously different factors are at play in Trump’s relationships with Israel, a U.S. ally, with longtime adversaries Russia and China and, more specifically, with each nation’s leaders. But all three cases reflect a personalization of foreign policy that is dangerously unique to Trump. For him, it’s less “what’s good for my country” than “what’s good for me” and “who likes me.” Time and again, he’s been explicit about that.

For all Trump’s cosplaying as a strongman, he shows his weakness as a national leader when he lets foreign counterparts share the wheel with him. As a consequence, he’s driving America erratically at best. At worst, he’s steering into another costly, bloody “forever war” of the sort he railed against for decades.

He’s gone in a direction in the Middle East that, polls show, pluralities or even majorities of Americans didn’t want to go. Trump has received none of the initial rally ’round support that past presidents enjoyed after initiating military operations. That’s a hazardous place to be domestically. Most Republicans are behind Trump on the war, but not by the usual high numbers. After all, it was disgust with forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that sent many people flocking to Trump’s “America First” banner to begin with.

For years he warned that other presidents and presidential candidates would start a war in Iran, World War III even. Yet here we are. And after days of what Kelly derided on air as the “10,000 different explanations” that Trump has given for attacking Iran and killing its top political and military leaders, on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphatically provided just one: Because Israel was going to strike Iran first, the United States had to join the attack to protect U.S. personnel and assets in the region from Iran’s retaliation.

Cue the blowback in MAGA world: “He’s flat out telling us that we’re in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand,” MAGA pundit Matt Walsh lashed out online. And then Trump contradicted his secretary of State on the rationale for the attacks. Yet Rubio wasn’t the only one citing Israel’s plans as the war’s predicate. So did House Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson. On Tuesday, Trump himself said he had to act fast because the Iranians “were getting ready to attack Israel.”

As Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded, “If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States, then we are in uncharted territory.”

Similarly, in June, Trump ordered a devastating one-off strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities to support Israel’s 12-day war against Iran. For months after, Netanyahu hounded Trump to stop the subsequent peace talks with Iran and go back on offense with Israel. So now Trump has complied, striking even as negotiations with Iran were ongoing. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the once respected Republican from South Carolina, offered his sycophantic spin: “Bibi and Trump are the modern Roosevelt-Churchill combination.”

The latters’ grave sites surely trembled.

As for Asia, Trump talks a good game against China, and, yes, he’s imposed big tariffs. But just as often he’s backtracked, often after talking with Xi. Trump’s admiration of the Chinese autocrat and his eagerness to please him is palpable. In fact, in dealing with Xi, Trump in both of his terms has violated his own words in “The Art of the Deal”: “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.”

No one is more worried about Trump’s regard for Xi than the Taiwanese, living under threat from China. Just recently Trump delayed arms sales to Taiwan approved by Congress lest he upset Xi ahead of their Beijing meeting in April.

In Europe, meanwhile, Trump continues to be played by Putin at the “peace” table to end Russia’s war in Ukraine — the war that candidate Trump said he’d settle in a day. More than a year later, he continues to harangue Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to make concessions to the invader, never demanding anything from Putin.

Most heinously, Trump’s 28-point “peace” plan last November incorporated everything that Putin/Russia dreamed of extracting from Ukraine, and for good reason: The proposal came from Moscow, passed from Putin’s flunky to Trump’s. That followed Trump’s humiliating summit with Putin last August in Alaska, giving the globally reviled Russian an American stage and pageantry and serving no purpose for the United States, only for Trump the showman. All the while, Russia continued ravaging Ukraine.

So much for Trump’s election promise. He doesn’t stop wars (his repeated claims to the contrary). But he does start them.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
Threads: @jkcalmes
X: @jackiekcalmes

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NEWS TODAY

Iran live: US Senate backs Trump’s attacks on Tehran, Israel pounds Lebanon | Israel-Iran conflict News

Mar 5, 2026 News Desk

US and Israel bombard Iran as Israeli forces hammer Lebanon and the widening conflict causes energy prices to spike.

Published On 5 Mar 2026

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NEWS TODAY

Trump’s Plan To Escort Ships Through Strait Of Hormuz Would Put U.S. Navy Warships In The Crosshairs

Mar 4, 2026 News Desk

U.S. Navy could soon be escorting commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, where maritime traffic has effectively stopped due to the current conflict with Iran, according to President Donald Trump. Doing so would demand that American naval vessels transit through the Strait, shifting them away from other duties. More importantly, it would also mean putting them right in a super weapons engagement zone full of Iranian threats that could include cruise and ballistic missiles, one-way-attack drones, explosive-laden kamikaze boats, and naval mines.

“If necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible,” President Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social social media network.

BREAKING: Trump:

Effective IMMEDIATELY, I have ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide, at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through… pic.twitter.com/a1wavLcfYU

— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 3, 2026

“Effective IMMEDIATELY, I have ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide, at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf,” he also wrote. “This will be available to all Shipping Lines.”

“No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD. The United States’ ECONOMIC and MILITARY MIGHT is the GREATEST ON EARTH,” he added. “More actions to come.”

U.S. Central Command declined to comment when reached for more details. TWZ has also reached out to the White House.

The Strait of Hormuz, which links the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, is just 20 nautical miles across at its narrowest point. A significant portion of the waterway falls within Iran’s national waters, which also overlap with those of Oman to the south. Under normal conditions, maritime traffic flows in and out through a pair of established two-mile-wide shipping lanes. Each year, roughly one-fifth of all global oil shipments, and an even higher percentage of seaborne shipments, pass through this one waterway. It is also a major conduit for liquid natural gas exports. Some 3,000 ships, including tankers and container ships, pass through each month.

Minimal vessel traffic seen in Strait of Hormuz amid reported closure

The latest #MarineTraffic playback shows visibly reduced transit density, alongside holding patterns, slower speeds, and vessels remaining outside the strait as operators reassess risk. pic.twitter.com/pfqk5rcbg8

— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) March 3, 2026

Politico had earlier reported that President Trump’s administration was considering both of these courses of action, citing unnamed sources.

“It’s becoming a growing concern that the energy markets could face pressures in the coming days as the military campaign intensifies and expands in geographic scope,” one individual said to be familiar with the discussions told that outlet. “Access to the Straits [sic] of Hormuz is obviously vital for both natural gas and crude oil shipments, especially from Qatar and Saudi [Arabia].”

Lloyd’s List has also reported that Trump’s announcement came “less than 24 hours after Navy officials told shipping industry representatives that there was ‘no chance’ of escorts happening any time soon.”

Several civilian vessels have already suffered attacks in and around the Strait since the United States and Israel launched their joint operation against Iran this past weekend. Though American officials insist that Iranian forces have been unable to seal off the highly strategic waterway, maritime traffic through it has now come to a near halt amid the ongoing fighting. Some ships appear to be making the transit with the transporters turned off to reduce the chance of being targeted. The real danger of attack has been compounded by insurers cancelling war risk policies ahead of what are expected to be major rate hikes.

🚢 Strait of Hormuz traffic drops to zero

West-to-east crossings averaged ~25–35 per day through February before tankers and container lines began pulling back amid escalating Gulf tensions.

By March 2, Bloomberg daily DSET CHOKE data showed transits at zero after Iran’s… pic.twitter.com/zlhLjl4m8q

— Michael McDonough (@M_McDonough) March 3, 2026

The USS *Stark* burns in the Persian Gulf after being hit by Exocet anti-ship cruise missiles launched from an Iraqi aircraft in 1987. *USN*

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NEWS TODAY

Western Gangster Journalism Runs Cover for Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’ in Venezuela

Mar 2, 2026 News Desk

The corporate media has endorsed and whitewashed US attacks against the Venezuelan oil industry. (US European Command)

US forces launched a military attack against Venezuela on January 3, reportedly killing over 100 people and kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and first lady Cilia Flores, who also serves as a National Assembly deputy.

Western corporate media have played an active role in recent years in legitimizing escalated US aggression against the Venezuelan people, from whitewashing economic sanctions that killed tens of thousands (FAIR.org, 6/4/21, 6/13/22) to outright calling for a military intervention (FAIR.org, 2/12/25, 11/19/25). They also exposed themselves once again as the fourth branch of the US national security state, opting not to publish information they had prior to the January 3 operation in order to “avoid endangering US troops” (FAIR.org, 1/13/26).

The brazen act of war has elicited zero dissent from the Western media establishment, no urge to challenge Trump’s return to early 20th century “gunboat diplomacy.” Worse, with the White House pushing to impose a semi-colonial protectorate and plunder Venezuela’s wealth, corporate outlets continue working overtime to normalize US imperialist predations.

Damage control

In the weeks since the attack, Western media have made a point of referring to Maduro as “arrested” (NBC, 1/5/26), “captured” (PBS, 2/10/26) or “ousted” (ABC, 1/5/26). The choice is far from innocent. By not stating that the Venezuelan leader was “kidnapped” or “abducted,” in a blatant violation of international law, establishment journalists are normalizing the US’s rogue actions, denying Maduro the proper protections of prisoner of war status (FAIR.org, 1/20/26).

But it is not just through semantic distortion that corporate outlets have quarantined any critique of the administration’s lawlessness. Another common feature has been a certain “damage control” in covering up Trump’s most outlandish statements.

After the January 3 military operation, Trump stated in a press conference that “many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years…died because of [Maduro].” No corporate outlets reported the outrageously false statement. (A couple of factchecking pieces—CBS, 1/6/26; New York Times, 1/8/26—addressed his adjacent, essentially unfalsifiable claim that “countless Americans” died due to Maduro.)

The attempts to make Trump’s Venezuela policy claims appear more rational are not new. For instance, in presidential press conferences, he constantly said that Venezuela had “emptied” its mental institutions into the US (X, 10/15/25, 11/2/25, 12/3/25, 1/3/26). But throughout 2025, the New York Times (11/4/25) mentioned this absurd statement just once, and the Washington Post (10/22/25, 12/21/25) did so twice.

On the domestic policy front, corporate journalists have had fewer qualms labeling Trump claims as “false,” when it comes to ending wars (CNN, 1/20/26), immigration (NBC, 2/4/26) or the 2020 US election (Guardian, 1/12/26). But they seem happy to carefully conceal or openly parrot false accusations that build the case for wars of aggression, whether in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and now Venezuela (FAIR.org, 8/1/05).

The vanishing cartel

In recent years, and especially in the second half of 2025, US officials justified escalating attacks against Venezuela on the grounds that Maduro and associates ran a drug trafficking operation, the so-called Cartel of the Suns. Trump himself, during his January 3 press conference, claimed Maduro “personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles.”

While experts consistently questioned the cartel’s existence, and specialized agencies, including the DEA, found Venezuela to play a marginal role in drug trafficking, media outlets reproduced the warmongering claims without scrutiny, citing only the denials from the Venezuelan president they have systematically demonized for over a decade (e.g., New York Times, 10/06/25; NPR, 11/12/25; CNN, 11/14/25).

But the biggest rebuff came from the Justice Department itself. When the time came to indict Maduro, US prosecutors dropped the accusation that the Venezuelan leader headed an actual drug cartel, and downgraded the Cartel of the Suns to a “patronage system.” In other words, the Justice Department was aware that the cartel charge had no substance, and instead accused Maduro of a much looser “drug trafficking conspiracy.”

But this remarkable about-face brought no accountability for the media establishment. Having spent years echoing claims that US prosecutors admitted would not hold in court, corporate outlets chose to ignore the new development, rather than exposing their shameful stenography over the years and taking responsibility for its deadly consequences. FAIR used Google to search for reporting on this crucial about-face in outlets including the Washington Post, Reuters, CNN, NBC and NPR, and found no results.

The one notable exception in this quasi-state corporate media circus was the New York Times‘ Charlie Savage (1/5/26), reporting on the administration’s quiet dropping of its casus belli. Savage wrote that this “called into greater question the legitimacy” of the administration’s designation of the Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organization. However, the piece stopped short of challenging the US military operation and illegal kidnapping of Maduro, referring to the Venezuelan leader as “captured” and “removed from power.”

The paper of record was quick to compensate for the vanishing of a flimsy regime-change trope by bringing up another one, focusing on a tried and tested dishonest narrative: Venezuela’s alleged ties with Hezbollah, one of the main opponents of the US and Israel in West Asia (FAIR.org, 5/24/19). Under the headline, “What to Know about Hezbollah’s Ties to Venezuela,” Times reporter Christina Goldbaum (1/19/26) offered nothing but a laundry list of unsubstantiated claims from anonymous officials.

Media connivance with Washington’s official narratives to justify imperialist attacks only pave the way for new iterations. Recently, in tightening the murderous blockade against Cuba, the Trump administration proffered the totally baseless claim of the Cuban government “providing a safe haven” for Hamas and Hezbollah. While the New York Times (1/30/26) uncharacteristically reminded readers that Trump offered no evidence, other outlets (NBC, 1/29/26; CNN, 1/30/26) were happy to echo the accusation uncritically.

Left: Breaking news! NBC (1/5/26) brought on Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to tell viewers that “the US case is strong.”; Right: Media like Politico (2/11/26) focused not on the United States’ stealing Venezuela’s oil, but on the question of whether it was doing so transparently enough.

Holding a country hostage

The media establishment’s support for US foreign policy did not end with the January 3 act of war. Since the attacks and presidential kidnapping, the Trump administration has taken control of Venezuelan oil exports at gunpoint after a month-long naval blockade that involved seizing tankers in the high seas for allegedly transporting Venezuelan crude in violation of unilateral US sanctions.

Under an initial agreement, Venezuela surrendered 30–50 million barrels for White House–picked intermediaries to transport and sell. Proceeds were deposited in bank accounts in Qatar, with a portion being returned to Carácas at the administration’s discretion (Venezuelanalysis, 1/21/26, 1/29/26). Analysts have argued that this arrangement explicitly violates the Venezuelan constitution.

Some articles have given space for Democrats to oppose the Trump deal, but mostly on the grounds of lack of transparency or opportunities for corruption (CNN, 1/15/26; Politico, 2/11/26; New York Times, 2/11/26). Readers will find no opposition on principle to the Trump administration’s Mafia-esque extortion of a sovereign nation’s natural resources, from the president himself saying the US will “keep some” of the hijacked Venezuelan oil (CNBC, 1/22/26) to Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing that the administration is “prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation” (New York Times, 1/28/26).

It is hard to find double standards, because no other nation on Earth unleashes this kind of gangster imperialism. But concerning Russia, Western media did not hold back from denouncing its “stealing,” “robbing” or “plundering” of Ukrainian minerals or grain, despite these resources being in territory that Russia occupies and claims sovereignty over (Washington Post, 8/10/22; Guardian, 12/11/23; DW, 8/28/23; New York Times, 6/5/22).

In a nutshell, when Washington imposed deadly sanctions against Venezuela, corporate pundits said these only targeted Maduro and were meant to promote democracy (FAIR.org, 6/14/19, 6/4/21, 6/13/22, 6/22/23). When the White House ramped up military threats, mainstream journalists parroted drug trafficking allegations (FAIR.org, 2/12/25, 11/19/25). When the drug trafficking charges were exposed, Western outlets reheated baseless stories about Hezbollah. And when Trump seized Venezuelan oil at gunpoint, the only mild concern was whether he would use it to enrich himself.

True to its roots in the “yellow journalism” of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the liberal media establishment is fully on board with Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine.” They have undoubtedly earned the title, to paraphrase Gen. Smedley Butler, of “gangster journalists for capitalism.”

Source: FAIR

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POLITICS

In recordings, Trump’s sister says he ‘has no principles’

Mar 2, 2026 Politics Desk

WASHINGTON — PresidentTrump’s older sister, a former federal judge, is heard sharply criticizing her brother in a series of recordings released Saturday, at one point saying of the president, “He has no principles.”

Maryanne Trump Barry was secretly recorded by her niece, Mary Trump, who recently released a book denouncing the president, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” Mary Trump said Saturday she made the recordings in 2018 and 2019.

In one recording, Barry, 83, says she had heard a 2018 interview with her brother on Fox News in which he suggested that he would put her on the border to oversee cases of immigrant children separated from their parents.

“His base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this,” Barry says.

At another point she says: “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God.” She adds: “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy — .”

Barry can also be heard saying that she guesses that her brother has never read her opinions on immigration cases.

“What has he read?” Mary Trump asks her aunt.

Barry responds: “No. He doesn’t read.”

The recordings were first reported by the Washington Post. The Associated Press then obtained the recordings.

The recordings came to light just a day after the late Robert Trump, brother to Maryanne and the president, was memorialized in a service at the White House. Later, the president was dismissive of the recordings.

“Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people,” Trump said in a statement. “Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before.”

In the weeks since the release of Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle, she has been questioned about the source of some of its information. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt. On Saturday, Mary Trump revealed that she had covertly taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry.

“Mary realized members of her family had lied in prior depositions,” said Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump. He added: “Anticipating litigation, she felt it prudent to tape conversations in order to protect herself.”

The president has frequently spoken highly of his sister; the recordings are the first time a family member, outside of Mary Trump, has been critical of him.

The recordings appear to illuminate tension between the president and his sister. At one point Barry says to her niece: “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Mary Trump’s book was filled with attacks on her uncle, including the assertion — he denied it — that he paid someone to take the SATs for him as he sought to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania.

In one recording, Barry says that a Joe Shapiro took the test for Trump. The president was friends with a person at Penn named Joe Shapiro, who is deceased. Shapiro’s widow and sister told have said he never took a test for anybody.

Bastardi said of Mary Trump: “She never expected to learn much of what she heard, including the president’s sister, federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, state that Donald Trump had paid someone to take an SAT exam for him.”

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NEWS TODAY

Netanyahu’s war? Analysts say Trump’s Iran strikes benefit Israel, not US | Donald Trump News

Mar 1, 2026 News Desk

President Donald Trump stood in front of regional leaders during a visit to the Middle East in May and declared a new era of US foreign policy in the region, one that is not guided by trying to reshape it or change its governing systems.

“In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” the US president said in rebuke of his hawkish predecessors.

History of warnings of the Iranian ‘threat’

Netanyahu, who promoted the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, has been warning for more than two decades that Iran is on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear bomb, and even Trump administration officials have acknowledged that Washington has no evidence that Tehran is weaponising its uranium enrichment programme.

After the US bombed Iran’s main enrichment facilities in the 12-day war in June last year – an attack that Trump says “obliterated” the country’s nuclear programme – Netanyahu pivoted to a new supposed Iranian threat: Tehran’s ballistic missiles.

“Iran can blackmail any American city,” Netanyahu told pro-Israel podcaster Ben Shapiro in October.

“People don’t believe it. Iran is developing intercontinental missiles with a range of 8,000km [5,000 miles], add another 3,000 [1,800 miles], and they can get to the East Coast of the US.”

Trump repeated that claim, which Tehran has vehemently denied and has not been backed by any public evidence or testing, in his State of the Union address earlier this week.

“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” he said of the Iranians.

Trump has been building the case for a wider war with Iran since the June conflict, repeatedly threatening to bomb the country again.

But the US president’s own National Security Strategy last year called for de-prioritising the Middle East in Washington’s foreign policy and focusing on the Western Hemisphere.

Meanwhile, the US public, wary of global conflict after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has also been largely opposed to new strikes against Iran, public opinion polls show.

Only 21 percent of respondents in a recent University of Maryland survey said they favoured a war with Iran.

The first day of the war saw Iran fire missiles against bases and cities that host US troops and assets across the Middle East in retaliation for the joint US-Israeli strikes, plunging the region into chaos.

Trump acknowledged that US troops may suffer casualties in the conflict. “That often happens in war,” he said on Saturday. “But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission.”

‘Ignoring the vast majority of Americans’

The Trump administration had appeared to step back from the brink of conflict earlier this month by engaging in diplomacy with Tehran.

US and Iranian negotiators held three rounds of talks over the past week, with Tehran stressing that it is willing to agree to rigorous inspections of its nuclear programme.

Omani mediators and Iranian officials had described the last round of negotiations, which took place on Thursday, as positive, saying that it yielded significant progress.

The June 2025 war, initiated by Israel without provocation, also came in the middle of US-Iran talks.

“Netanyahu’s agenda has always been to prevent a diplomatic solution, and he feared Trump was actually serious about getting a deal, so the start of this war in the middle of negotiations is a success for him, just like it was last June,” Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told Al Jazeera.

“Trump’s embrace of regime change rhetoric is a further victory for Netanyahu, and loss for the American people, as it suggests the US may be committed to a long and unpredictable military boondoggle.”

While announcing the strikes on Saturday, Trump said his aim is to prevent Iran from “threatening America and our core national security interests”.

But US critics, including some proponents of Trump’s “America first” movement, have argued that Iran – more than 10,000km (6,000 miles) away – does not pose a threat to the US.

Earlier this month, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that “if it were not for Iran, there wouldn’t be Hezbollah; we wouldn’t have the problem on the border with Lebanon”.

Carlson said, “What problem on the border with Lebanon? I’m an American. I’m not having any problems on the border with Lebanon right now. I live in Maine.”

On Saturday, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib stressed that the US public does not want war with Iran.

“Trump is acting on the violent fantasies of the American political elite and the Israeli apartheid government, ignoring the vast majority of Americans who say loud and clear: No More Wars,” Tlaib said in a statement.

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NEWS TODAY

Golden Age? Most Americans Reject Trump’s Claims of Booming Economy, Poll Finds

Feb 27, 2026 News Desk

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted the U.S. economy as “roaring” and declared inflation “defeated” since returning to office in January 2025. In his recent State of the Union address, he called it “the golden age of America,” claiming unprecedented economic prosperity.

However, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that most Americans across party lines do not share that view. The poll, conducted online with 4,638 adults and a two-point margin of error, finds that 68% of respondents disagree with the statement that “the U.S. economy is booming.” Even among Republicans, who form Trump’s political base, opinion is sharply divided: 56% agree the economy is booming, while 43% disagree.

Cost of Living Remains Top Concern

Americans interviewed cited rising costs as their primary worry. In Tennessee, manufacturing worker Marcus Tripp said: “Even as a two-income household, we are struggling… I am worried more about how much my rent and everything is going up than I am about whether the guy down the street has citizenship documents or not.”

Poll respondents overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s claim that inflation has been defeated. Only 16% agreed with the statement that “there is hardly any inflation in the U.S.,” while 82% of independents and 72% of Republicans disagreed. Democrats were even more skeptical, with a strong majority rejecting the notion of a booming economy.

Awareness of Trump’s Economic Policies

The poll also revealed limited public knowledge of Trump’s specific proposals:

44% had never heard of the plan to restrict large investors from buying single-family homes.
48% were unaware of the proposed cap on credit card interest rates at 10%.
By contrast, 78% were aware of tariff increases on imported goods, with many expecting the tariffs to raise the cost of living 54% overall, including 69% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans.

Some voters expressed frustration that policies emphasizing tariffs may not address the issues they feel most acutely. Independent voter Tiffany Ritchie of Corpus Christi said, “We’re not going to tariff our way out of this.”

Political Implications Ahead of Midterms

The poll’s results are a warning for Trump and the Republican Party as they head into the November 3 midterms, defending majorities in both the House and Senate. Cost-of-living concerns are emerging as a decisive factor for voters, potentially outweighing immigration and other campaign issues that Trump has emphasized.

Primaries are already underway in states such as Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas, with both parties beginning to select candidates for the midterms. Economists predict modest growth this year, but few expect the kind of “booming” economy Trump describes.

Analysis

From my perspective, the poll highlights a growing disconnect between Trump’s rhetoric and the lived experience of many Americans. While the administration touts economic successes, households are still struggling with rising rents, groceries, and energy costs.

The division among Republicans is also notable. While Trump’s base remains partially supportive of his economic claims, nearly half of the party’s voters see little evidence of a boom. This split could weaken the Republican message in key battleground districts, especially where cost-of-living pressures are most acute.

Moreover, the limited public awareness of some Trump policies suggests that policy communication is lagging. Tariffs are well-known, but policies targeting housing and credit remain obscure, potentially limiting their political impact.

In short, while Trump frames the U.S. economy as a “golden age,” the reality for many voters is very different. Rising living costs, skepticism among independents, and division within his own party suggest that economic messaging alone may not be enough to secure midterm victories.

With information from Reuters.

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