Trump Admits He May Be Fine With Another Religious Leader in Iran

Donald Trump only has one requirement for who should lead Iran after its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in airstrikes last week: be on good terms with the U.S. and its top ally.

They need to “treat the United States and Israel well,” Trump told CNN’s Dana Bash in a phone interview Friday morning. Trump envisions Iran working out like Venezuela, he said to Bash, adding that he “may be” OK with a religious leader leading the country.

Trump said he wanted to pick Iran’s next leader, repeating what he said on Thursday. “It’s going to work very easily, it’s going to work like it did in Venezuela,” he said according to Bash, who relayed the conversation on the network. “We have a wonderful leader there. She’s doing a fantastic job, and it’s going to work like that.”

In Venezuela, the U.S. military abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro early on the morning of January 3 but did not implement a plan of succession, instead allowing Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to succeed Maduro while Trump declared himself “acting president” of the South American country.

A similar situation is not likely to happen in Iran by Trump’s own admission, as has claimed multiple times this week that many of the likely candidates to lead Iran are dead. One possible candidate that has emerged as a possible new leader is Khamenei’s son, cleric Mojtaba Khamenei, but Trump has rejected him.

“Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me. We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran,” Trump said Thursday, adding that Mojtaba Khamenei’s accession to power would lead to war again “in five years.”

Trump’s words mean that he simply wants compliance and not the total regime change some on the right, as well his supporters among the Iranian diaspora, have been calling for. It once again shows that there was no administration plan for a postwar Iran, and that Trump has been making it up as he goes along, recklessly bombing the country with no clear end in sight.

Donald Trump is insisting that the United States is secretly evacuating citizens stranded in the Middle East—but multiple reports indicate they have been left on their own.

In a post on Truth Social Friday, Trump lauded the efforts of the State Department in getting Americans out of range of the illegal war he started. “We are moving thousands of people out of various Countries throughout the Middle East,” he wrote. “It is being done quietly, but seamlessly.”

Trump’s post comes as veteran diplomats blame the State Department for conducting evacuations out of the region that are too slow and started too late, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Despite the weeks of planning ahead for the U.S. and Israel’s assault on Iran, the State Department did not issue travel advisories or restrictions for Americans. Given the fact that Trump had spent weeks loudly amassing military assets in the Middle East, a warning to Americans would not have ruined the surprise attack, diplomats told the Times.

The State Department announced Wednesday that the first chartered flights to evacuate Americans had departed for the Middle East—days after Trump launched an initial barrage of strikes against Iran. They didn’t say how many flights would be operating.

The State Department initially instructed citizens abroad to flee on their own, telling them to seek commercial flights amid a massive wave of flight cancellations.

Yael Lempert, who served as the Biden administration’s ambassador to Jordan, told the Times that Iran’s strikes against neighboring countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were an all too predictable outcome, and that airspace in the region had been previously closed during similar strikes.

“It’s stunning there were no orders for authorized departure for nonessential U.S. government employees and family members in almost all the affected diplomatic missions in the region—nor public recommendations to American citizens to depart—until days into the war,” Lempert said.

Trump practically admitted Tuesday he had no plan for evacuations—he didn’t even have a plan for the war itself.

Meanwhile, the State Department has pushed back on claims that it left Americans high and dry, insisting that it assisted more than 10,000 Americans abroad, of the 20,000 who had returned to the United States since the conflict began. But some critics have pointed out that assisting Americans could simply mean providing security guidance.

As job growth stagnates, as oil prices spike amid war on Iran, and as the majority of Americans view his second term negatively, President Trump has laid his eyes on Cuba.

In a phone call with CNN’s Dana Bash on Friday, Trump, unprompted, turned his attention to Cuba.

“Cuba is going to fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is gonna fall too. They want to make a deal so badly,” Trump said

When asked how, Trump said, “They want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put [Secretary of State] Marco [Rubio] over there and we’ll see how that works. But we’re really focused on [Iran] now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready—after 50 years.

“I’ve been watching it for 50 years, and it’s fallen right into my lap because of me, it’s fallen, but it’s nevertheless fallen right into the lap. And we’re doing very well.”

Trump last week threatened a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, and he has already destabilized the island with his aggressive oil blockade, baselessly declaring the Cuban government an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” The blockade has led to power outages, business closings, and price gouging. If he is true to his word, this would be the third coup in his second term, after Venezuela and Iran.

Surprise, surprise: Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again stabbed Donald Trump in the back—but this time, it wasn’t about the war in Ukraine, it was about Iran.

Russia has been helping Iran target the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft, three officials told The Washington Post Friday.

“It does seem like it’s a pretty comprehensive effort,” one official told the Post. It was unclear exactly how much assistance Russia was providing, as Iran’s targeting capabilities have weakened significantly since strikes from the U.S. and Israel began last week.

But Nicole Grajewski, a scholar on Iran’s cooperation with Russia at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, suggested that Iran’s strikes against U.S. forces indicate a high level of sophistication.

“They’re getting through air defenses,” Grajewski told the Post, noting that Iran appeared to have become more advanced since it responded to Israeli strikes last summer.

In addition to the CIA’s station in the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Iran has also attacked command and control infrastructure, radars, and temporary structures, such as the one where six U.S. service members were killed.

This is the first indication that another U.S. adversary has entered the spiraling regional conflict in the Middle East—and it’s the one with nuclear capabilities and an extensive intelligence network.

Earlier this week, when asked about whether he had a message to China or Russia—some of Iran’s biggest backers—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “They’re not really a factor here.”

During his second term, Trump’s long-standing fondness for Putin has been increasingly put under strain, as Moscow has repeatedly gone back on public agreements to spare Ukrainians and delayed negotiations to end Russia’s violent incursion there.

The U.S. president could not care less if Iran’s violent retaliation includes the deaths of American citizens. Actually, it’s something he’s planning for.

When asked by Time if Americans should be worried about Iran attacking them at home, Trump responded: “I guess.”

“But I think they’re worried about that all the time,” he continued. “We think about it all the time. We plan for it. 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 self-titled “peace president” has so far used his second term to sweep foreign cities, massacre foreign leadership, and indiscriminately bomb civilian targets, such as elementary schools in Tehran.

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were at a girls’ school in the country’s south.

Still, Trump has not directly addressed the American people, even as Republicans discuss the potentially unavoidable reality of a U.S. ground invasion in Iran.

That’s a major departure from his predecessors that sat at the Resolute Desk, who universally recognized the need to immediately justify military intervention to the public. Woodrow Wilson spoke to the nation the same day he asked Congress to declare war against Germany during World War I, while Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a national address hours before the country declared war during World War II.

Just one in four Americans say they support the war in Iran, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published Monday. In the same survey, 56 percent of respondents said they believe Trump is too quick to use military force as a foreign policy solution.

Republicans in Congress want the Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against Cassidy Hutchinson, a White House aide in Donald Trump’s first administration who testified against the president during congressional hearings about the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. 

CNN reports that Representative Barry Loudermilk referred Hutchinson to the DOJ just days ago, accusing her of lying to Congress when she testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attacks in June 2022. Representative Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, co-signed the referral.  

Hutchinson’s testimony was explosive at the time, as she claimed that Trump was fully aware of the potential for violence on Capitol Hill and was extra agitated on that day. She said he wanted to march on the Capitol with his supporters from the Ellipse, but was told by his aides and Secret Service detail that it wouldn’t be safe. Furious, Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of The Beast, the presidential limousine, but when a Secret Service agent took his arm, Trump grabbed the agent’s neck, she said. 

Hutchinson, who served as an aide to Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, also testified that Trump wanted his armed supporters to be able to protest that day. She said that Meadows overheard a conversation in which Trump said that Vice President Mike Pence “deserves it” as his mob of supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol.  

For having the audacity to reveal this damaging information about Trump, his MAGA supporters have had Hutchinson in their crosshairs for a long time. In December 2024, Loudermilk accused former Representative Liz Cheney, an anti-Trump Republican on the January 6 committee, of colluding with Hutchinson on her testimony, and FBI Director Kash Patel included Hutchinson on the MAGA enemies list in his 2022 book Government Gangsters.

Now it’s up to the DOJ and Attorney General Pam Bondi to decide whether to charge Hutchinson. Bondi has tried to take revenge on some of the president’s adversaries, but none of the attempts have been successful yet. That’s probably because none of them have broken any laws in exposing Trump’s misdeeds. 

The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs, and unemployment rose 4.4 percent in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, a dismal economic showing for an economy that was already on shaky ground. 

“Let me put this another way: The US economy has LOST jobs since April 2025. Total job gains since from May 2025 to February 2026 are now -19,000,” Navy Federal chief economist Heather Long wrote. “Companies are not hiring in the face of all of these headwinds and uncertainty. And even healthcare is starting to slow down.”

Job losses hit nearly every major sector, including health care. And Black unemployment is back up to 7.7 percent after being down at 7.3 percent in January.

Stagnant job growth has been a defining trend of the Trump economy in this second term, even as the president blames any negative trends on former President Biden while declaring over and over again that the economy is thriving every day. And this February report doesn’t account for the cost of the war President Trump just started with Iran, which will surely drive up gas prices and squeeze people thin while they can’t even find a job.  

Trump has yet to comment on the numbers. 

This story has been updated.

U.S. military investigators believe that it’s likely the United States was responsible for the deadly strike that killed more than 175 people, including dozens of children, at a girls’ school in Iran.

Two U.S. officials told Reuters Thursday that the horrific attack at Shajarah Tayyebeh over the weekend was most likely the work of the U.S. military, but they noted that the investigation was still ongoing and did not rule out discovering evidence that could point the blame elsewhere.

The strike on the girls’ primary school is the deadliest single attack of the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign thus far. Among the dead were dozens of young girls between the ages of 7 and 12, according to the public prosecutor in Minab. In a statement Sunday, Unesco condemned the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh as a grave violation of international law, which prohibits attacks on schools.

An analysis from The New York Times suggested that the school had been struck at the same time as a U.S. strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, naval base next door—indicating that the U.S. was likely responsible for both.

It was not immediately clear why the school was targeted. Satellite images from 2013 showed that the school was previously connected to the IRGC naval base. More recent satellite images from 2016 showed that the school had been separated from the naval base by a wall.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that the U.S. “would not deliberately target a school.”

While one would like to buy into Rubio’s pearl clutching, it’s worth noting that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has openly admitted to setting aside the rules of engagement—who’s to say he doesn’t have the same attitude toward international law?

The Justice Department released FBI interviews with a woman who accused Donald Trump of beating her after he sexually assaulted her when she was a child.

The interviews took place between August and October 2019. The woman, according to her testimony, was abused by Jeffrey Epstein for years. Her name is redacted across three separate files, but her allegation against the president is clear: Trump punched her on the side of her head after she bit his penis. She was between 13 and 15 years old at the time, she told investigators, when Epstein brought her to a “very tall building with huge rooms” in either New York or New Jersey. That’s where the prolific sex trafficker introduced her to Trump, she recalled.

Trump “didn’t like that I was a boy-girl,” the woman told investigators, referencing a tomboy.

There were other people present in the room, according to the files, but they left at Trump’s request.

She remembered that Trump told her something to the effect of, “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.” He then unzipped his pants and put her head “down to his penis.” She “bit the shit out of it,” and Trump “struck her,” saying something to the effect of “Get this little bitch the hell out of here,” according to the interview.

The woman claimed that she bit Trump’s penis at the time “because he disgusted her.”

“He had money, it reeked off of him,” she said.

She noted that Trump appeared jealous of Epstein, though at some point “they ended up on level playing fields.” She recalled that Trump and Epstein would sometimes use the terms “fresh meat,” “untainted,” and “not jaded” when referring to girls.

She told investigators she had two additional interactions with Trump but did not linger on the topic.

The woman claimed Epstein’s associates harassed her for years after the abuse ended, sending her numerous death threats. In one instance, she and her mother were run off a road while driving, forcing her to remain silent.

She also claimed that her mother spent time in prison due to an “embezzlement conviction connected to being blackmailed” by Epstein and a man named “Jim Atkins,” whom she identified as an employee of an Ohio university, “over explicit photographs” that Epstein took of her during the abuse.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the release amounted to “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.”

“The total baselessness of these accusations is also supported by the obvious fact that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice knew about them for four years and did nothing with them—because they knew President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong,” she continued. “As we have said countless times, President Trump has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein files.”

The Department of Justice had previously removed the record of this woman’s FBI interviews from their Epstein database.

Trump is mentioned more than 38,000 times in the Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the DOJ’s February document dump, which consisted of some three million previously unseen pages. All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.

Nonetheless, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN’s State of the Union that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer and did not find any credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding onto upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

On Thursday, President Trump announced that Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin is his nominee to replace Kristi Noem as Department of Homeland Security secretary. A hardcore MAGA acolyte, Mullin is known for blind, raging loyalty to President Trump and the movement. 

Here are five extreme moments that demonstrate that: 

1. Mullin tried to get into fistfight with union leader in Senate hearing.

In 2023, Mullin questioned Teamsters head Sean O’Brien over his negative tweets about him, in which he called the senator a “clown” and a “fraud.” 

“Sir, this is a time, this is a place, if you want to run your mouth we can be two consenting adults and finish it here,” Mullin said.

“OK, that’s fine. Perfect,” responded International Brotherhood of Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien.

“You want to do it now?” Mullin asked. “Stand your butt up then.”

“You stand your butt up, big guy,” retorted O’Brien.

Senator Bernie Sanders was eventually able to de-escalate the situation. “You’re a United States senator, sit down,” boomed Sanders. “This is a hearing. God knows the American people have enough contempt for Congress.” Mullin later posted a picture of himself cleaning his guns on X. 

2. He admitted to giving President Trump “cover” from Epstein files scrutiny. 

Last summer, Mullin and Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego each put forth a resolution on the Epstein files that they claimed was transparent. While Gallego called for the Justice Department to release all files in full without caveat, Mullin called on the department to release “all credible information” related specifically to Epstein’s sealed legal proceedings. 

“I’m sure this would be handled just like any other thing [the Democrats] have tried to go after like the baseless impeachments. Or the bases—baseless special counsels. Or the unbelievable amount of charges they tried to file against the president,” Mullin said while objecting to Gallego’s resolution. “I’m sure this would be handled the exact same way. What we’re simply wanting to do here, is give [Trump] cover.”

3. He called the the mayor of Washington, D.C., a very racist man (she’s a woman).

During an interview on Fox News last summer, Mullin criticized D.C.’s  “very racist mayor” for making Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the nation’s capital about race.

“And people may get eyebrows when I raise that, but he is the one that brings in race into the conversation, so he’s the one that’s pointing the fingers at it, and when you point one finger you got three pointing back at ya,” Mullin said. “But for him to say that, and flat-out lie to the American people, he knows exactly what’s happening.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is a Black woman, and never said that the takeover was about race.  

4. Mullin called the U.S. operation in Iran a “war”—then took it back and called it a “misspoke.”

“This is war, and we’re taking out the threat,” he said  earlier this week, when asked if more top Iranian officials were at risk from future strikes after the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “And if you’re part of the threat, then you’re a target,” Mullin said.

“You’ll concede this is war?” a reporter clarified. 

“We haven’t declared war,” Mullin said, directly contradicting the first three words he said seconds ago. “That was a misspoke.”

5. Mullin confused who the U.S. president is twice.

Mullin called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the president twice while trying to wax poetic about war on Fox News. 

“War is ugly, it smells bad, and if anybody’s ever been there and been able to smell the war that’s happened around you and taste it and fill it in your nostrils and hear it, it’s something that you’ll never forget, and it’s ugly,” he said. Mullin has never been to war. 

“And fortunately, you have President Hegseth—or I say President Hegseth—Secretary Hegseth, that has got a great relationship with President Trump, and President Hegseth’s been there. He’s done that.”