The Reason Trump Hasn’t Attacked Iran Yet Will Blow Your Mind

Is Donald Trump delaying action in Iran so he can go to the Winter Olympics?

This week, the so-called peacemaker president has assembled the greatest amount of air power in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but reportedly hasn’t approved military action against Iran—yet.

One factor in the president’s pending decision is the ongoing Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, sources familiar with the matter told The Washington Post Thursday.

There has been increasing speculation that Trump is planning to make a surprise appearance at the men’s hockey finals on Sunday, if Team USA—the favorites to win gold—qualify for the match. Trump also announced last week that a presidential delegation led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon would attend the closing ceremony in Milan on Sunday.

The decision to launch a military strike on Iran would potentially jeopardize travel plans for Trump and his officials. (Obviously, it could also jeopardize a lot more—but that doesn’t seem to be Trump’s chief concern here.)

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of his so-called Board of Peace in Washington Thursday, Trump offered Iran 10 days to come to a diplomatic solution—or risk military action. That would give him just enough time to visit Milan, likely so he can get loudly booed just like Vice President JD Vance was at the opening ceremony.

In the meantime, the U.S. military has deployed 13 warships and a large fleet of aircraft to the Middle East, with a second aircraft carrier en route to the region.

Federal judges have ordered the release of at least three of 10 West African immigrants who were swarmed by federal agents in multiple immigration raids in October and November on New York City’s Canal Street, a popular site for street vendors.

Serigne Diop, Mamdou Ndoye, and Abdou Tall will be released, while the other seven men remain in ICE detention centers in Louisiana and New Jersey.

Manhattan District Judge Vernon S. Broderick noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to provide a warrant or probable cause to arrest Ndoye, in particular, writing, “Absent such procedures, the agency will be free to either engage in preplanned decisions to unlawfully detain individuals and then come up with post hoc rationalizations, or merely randomly stage ‘encounters’ without the intent to unlawfully detain individuals and then create post hoc rationalizations for these unlawful detentions.”

“The court-ordered releases for these three individuals confirm what we all know, which is that federal law enforcement officers carried out illegal and unconstitutional roundups on the streets of Chinatown,” said Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

The Department of Homeland Security insists that the arrests were justified.

“Despite activist judges, President Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem will continue fighting for the arrest, detention, and removal of criminal illegal aliens who have no right to terrorize our communities,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

The Department of Justice’s headquarters in Washington now features a banner of Donald Trump.

The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, also called Main Justice, on Thursday became the latest federal building to get plastered with a portrait of the Supreme Leader—in a symbolic blow to the agency’s independence.

After the Watergate scandal, the Department of Justice installed new safeguards to ensure the DOJ remained a “neutral zone” from the politics of the White House, and made assurances that the department’s attorneys “must always be committed to good judgment and integrity,” according to the Brenner Center for Justice.

Seeing Trump’s face on the facade of Main Justice simply verifies what Americans have been witnessing for months: Trump has completely taken over the federal agency intended to implement an impartial—and nonpartisan—rule of law.

Earlier this month, DOJ officials began to hold daily meetings to discuss Trump’s efforts to investigate and punish his perceived political enemies, such as former special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The president later joked that he had a “right” to weaponize the DOJ.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice appears to be engaged in a large-scale cover-up to protect many of the individuals implicated in the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein—including the president himself. The agency’s leader, Attorney General Pam Bondi, has repeatedly lied about Trump’s alleged wrongdoing, and reoriented her department to exact his revenge fantasies and defend his billionaire buddies.

It won’t be bigger or better, but the Trump administration is reportedly working to create a U.S. dupe of the World Health Organization.

The Department of Health and Human Services is proposing a plan that would cost taxpayers $2 billion a year to recreate the same systems that the country had access to when it was a member of the WHO, according to officials that spoke with The Washington Post Thursday.

The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the WHO on January 22. In a statement, DHS blamed the exit on the global public health entity’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet Donald Trump—who railed against the WHO for years—saw it differently. On his first day back in office, Trump chalked the withdrawal up to “unfairly onerous payments,” claiming that the cost of membership within the WHO was disproportionately shouldered by the U.S.

But the federal directive has not quelled nationwide demand for health data. Over the last several weeks, Illinois and California both sidestepped the government to independently join the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, or GOARN, in newly localized efforts to stay abreast of changes in global health.

The White House’s plan to recreate the WHO’s health surveillance operation would involve the creation of laboratories, data-sharing networks, and rapid-response systems that the U.S. abandoned when it withdrew from the WHO last month—only this time, it will cost Americans much, much more.

The total cost could be as much as three times the price of America’s WHO membership. Citing figures in the proposal, U.S. officials told the Post that America’s contributions to the WHO fell somewhere between 15 and 18 percent of the entity’s total annual funding of $3.7 billion. On the high end, that would represent a $666 million annual membership fee.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration worked decisively last year to gut USAID, which did much of the work that the White House is planning to do with its slapdash WHO replacement.

But the Trump administration would apparently prefer to spend more, not less, for an inferior product.

Public health researchers were appalled by the initiative, arguing that the U.S.-led operation would not serve as an adequate or effective replacement to the WHO’s data-sharing program.

“Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. “We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere the influence we had.”

President Trump wants to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza.

Board of Peace contracting records viewed by The Guardian show that the Trump administration plans to use more than 350 acres of desolate land in southern Gaza full of twisted metal from multiple Israeli bombing campaigns to construct a massive base with 26 armored watchtowers, bunkers, an arms range, and a storage warehouse—all encircled in barbed wire.

The base will serve as the headquarters for the upcoming International Stabilization Force, which the Trump and the Jared Kushner–led Board of Peace say will have de facto control of Gaza. It is unclear what the rules of engagement for this force will be, and whether they will collaborate with the United Nations in any way.

“The Board of Peace is a kind of legal fiction, nominally with its own international legal personality separate from both the UN and the United States, but in reality it’s just an empty shell for the United States to use as it sees fit,” Rutgers law professor Adil Haque told The Guardian.

More importantly, this move shows once again that even amid the destruction and violence of Israel’s genocide, Palestinian sovereignty is still of no concern to the Trump administration, or any parties involved in this so-called Board of Peace.

“Whose permission did they get to build that military base?” asked Palestinian Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu.