“Locked and Loaded”: Trump Threatens Iran in 3 a.m. Post

President Donald Trump threatened to intervene in Iran if the regime hurts protesters, warning the United States is “locked and loaded.”

“If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 2:58 a.m. on Friday morning. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Iran entered its sixth day of consecutive protests on Friday, as the people are fed up with the regime, soaring inflation, and the collapse of the Iranian rial. At least seven people have been killed so far, according to the AP.

Iranian officials have already responded to Trump’s threats by implying that the protests in recent days have been fomented by the United States—despite the protests’ widespread support—and warning the Trump administration about next steps.

“With the statements by Israeli officials and @realDonaldTrump, what has been going on behind the scenes is now clear,” Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, wrote on X. “Trump should know that U.S. interference in this internal matter would mean destabilizing the entire region and destroying America’s interests. The American people should know—Trump started this adventurism. They should be mindful of their soldiers’ safety.”

Iran’s foreign minister, meanwhile, called Trump’s statement a “flagrant violation” of international law.

It’s impossible to root for anyone in this standoff, other than the people of Iran, but Trump threatening another international conflict—while we also appear to be walking into war with Venezuela—is certainly at least some cause for concern.

President Donald Trump posted a picture of a dead bird felled by a windmill on Tuesday, yet another example of his aesthetic disdain for wind power.

“Windmills are killing our beautiful Bald Eagles!” he captioned the post.

But the bird is not a bald eagle, it’s a falcon. And it isn’t even in America—the image is from a 2017 Israeli news article detailing birds and bats being killed by windmills, as MeidasTouch pointed out on X.

This is another incredibly stupid moment from our president that will likely get lost in the plethora of others. Did anyone review the post at all? It’s so off base that Trump himself might as well have screenshot, cropped, and posted the pictures.

Trump has railed against windmills to justify his preference for coal and natural gas lobbies. He called windmill fields “killing fields” in 2018 and just this summer claimed that windmills in Europe were driving whales “loco.”

Donald Trump’s next Washington vanity project will be going up sooner rather than later.

The president told Politico Wednesday that he expects construction to break ground on his highly teased “Triumphal Arc” (yes, “arc”) within the next two months.

“It hasn’t started yet. It starts sometime in the next two months. It’ll be great. Everyone loves it,” Trump said. “They love the ballroom too. But they love the Triumphal Arc.”

The “Arc de Trump” will be erected near the Arlington Bridge, opposite the Lincoln Memorial, according to the president. It will be modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the historic monument that commemorates those who fought and died for France during the country’s revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Earlier this month, Trump claimed that early models for his arc were so evocative that his former speechwriter, Vince Haley, cried at their beauty.

“Vince came in one day, and his eyes were teeming. He couldn’t believe how beautiful. He saw it, and he wanted to do that,” the president said at a White House Christmas reception.

The president’s arc campaign is the latest in a string of high-profile projects that he has pitched ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. He’s already hard at work on a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the construction of which apparently required the complete demolition of the White House East Wing, despite the fact that Trump pledged months earlier that the project would be “near but not touching” the presidential mansion.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise; gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore; and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.

Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of its own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

The president is thrusting some of the blame for Minnesota’s day care scandal onto Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

State officials have come under fire since right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley reported Friday that empty or abandoned day care facilities were still receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

The Department of Health and Human Services paused $185 million in aid to the state in light of the video, despite the fact that elements of Shirley’s report were incorrect or inadequately reported. At least two of the centers featured in Shirley’s video had been closed for several years, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families told NewsNation.

But the nitty gritty of the situation didn’t matter to Donald Trump, who baselessly asserted on Truth Social Wednesday that Omar was one of the scammers sucking up undue funds.

“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90 percent, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” Trump posted. “‘Congresswoman’ Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers.”

More than a dozen schemes have popped up in Minnesota’s safety net programs in recent years, many of them involving members of the state’s Somali population. They haven’t gone unchecked: More than 90 Minnesotans were charged in federal fraud investigations that began under the Biden administration, at least 60 of which have resulted in convictions.

But Omar, the first Somali American lawmaker and one of the first Muslim women in Congress, doesn’t have any connection to the fraudsters beyond her heritage.

Instead, it was clear that Trump was singularly interested in attacking Omar’s ethnicity, dredging up an old right-wing conspiracy that the lawmaker had married her brother.

“Did she really marry her brother?” Trump asked rhetorically in his post. “Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother to bring him into the U.S. The conspiracy first emerged during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.

Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. At the time, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother as “absurd and offensive.”

President Donald Trump has vetoed a bill that would expand the territory of a small Native American tribe in the Everglades because they didn’t support his “Alligator Alcatraz” plans.

“Despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected. My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country,” Trump wrote in a message to Congress Tuesday night.

“It is not the Federal Government’s responsibility to pay to fix problems in an area that the Tribe has never been authorized to occupy. For these reasons, I cannot support the Miccosukee Reserved Amendments Act.”

The Miccosukee Tribe was part of a lawsuit along with two environmental groups—Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity—that argued that the Trump administration and Florida state government hadn’t carried out the required environmental review for the construction of the detention center deep in the cherished Southern Florida wetlands.

Now Trump is denying their effort to regain just a portion of the land that was taken from them in the First and Second Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century.

The Miccosukee weren’t the only ones hit with a spiteful veto from a most spiteful president. In Colorado, Trump shot down a massive clean water project that was years in the making because MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert refused to cave to his pressure to stay mum on the Epstein files. She voted for their release, and now 39 communities may have to go back to the drawing board for their clean water.