Trump Refuses to Answer Key Question on Winning Iran War

We’re almost two weeks into the Iran war, and President Donald Trump still isn’t sure what his goals are.

Asked on Wednesday whether he would be able to declare victory in the Middle East if Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—becomes the new supreme leader of Iran, Trump balked.

“I don’t want to comment on that,” the president said.

Trump then changed the subject, launching into one of his patented rambling monologues: “I spoke with various countries, the leaders of various countries. You’ll have a list. And they said they’ve never seen anything like it.… We have the greatest military in the world by far.”

In comments given just a few hours later, Trump added that the U.S. “knocked out, twice, [Iranian] leadership. Now they have a new group coming up. Let’s see what happens to them.”

While Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a brutal ruler, quashing local dissent and sometimes executing citizens who defied his regime, Mojtaba Khamenei may be even worse for regular Iranians. A report from the Atlantic Council noted that Mojtaba is close with the “most ideologically extremist clerics” in Iran, and some experts say he is more likely to sink resources into building nuclear weapons than his father. Mojtaba was closely involved in his father’s decision-making throughout the latter’s time as supreme leader.

Trump said he was “not happy” with the Iranian Council of Experts’ decision to appoint the younger Khamenei as supreme leader last week. “I have to be involved in the appointment,” he told Axios at the time.

By not answering what should be an easy question, Trump is continuing what seems to be his Cabinet’s prevailing strategy surrounding the war: Be as unclear and disorganized as possible. Trump and his officials have not been able to decide whether the Iran war is a war or not, whether it’s over or just getting started, what caused the U.S. to get involved, and what exactly our demands for the people we’re bombing should be.

The Iran war ending would obviously be a good thing. But if all that changed is that we assassinated the ayatollah and now have his even crazier son in charge of the country, then what the hell was all this for?

President Donald Trump has doubled down on playing dumb about killing dozens of school-age girls in Iran.

Outside the White House Wednesday, a reporter asked Trump about a new U.S. military report that found the United States was responsible for a deadly missile strike on a girls’ primary school miles from Tehran. The strike killed 175 people, many of them young girls.

“As commander in chief do you take responsibility for that?” the reporter asked.

“That is—what? What did you—? For what?” Trump said, as a helicopter whirred loudly behind him. The reporter repeated the question.

“I don’t know about it,” Trump said before moving on.

Earlier this week, Trump spoke at length about a report that the strike had involved a Tomahawk missile—a weapon primarily used by the U.S. military—and claimed Iran could be behind it. When pressed on his accusation, he admitted: “I just don’t know enough about it.”

Trump said Saturday that it was his “opinion” that the strike was done by Iran. “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said while on Air Force One. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stood lurking behind the president, had done his best to dodge the question, saying that the strike was under investigation, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”

The New York Times reported that the February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, a girls’ primary school in Minab, was due to a targeting error by the U.S. military as it conducted a strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base next door.

U.S. Central Command determined the target using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, people briefed on the investigation told the Times. Satellite images from 2013 showed that the school was previously connected to the IRGC naval base, while more recent satellite images from 2016 showed that the school had been separated from the base by a wall.

Unesco condemned the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh as a grave violation of international law, which prohibits attacks on schools. But evidently Trump is uninterested in taking responsibility—or accountability—for the brutal war crime.

The FBI warned police departments in California that Iran may be planning a retaliatory drone strike on the state.

“We recently acquired information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” a memo obtained by ABC News read. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”

The FBI offered no other specifics, and the White House also refused to publicly comment.

“We know Iran has an extensive presence in Mexico and South America, they have relationships, they have the drones and now they have the incentive to conduct attacks,” former Obama administration DHS secretary John Cohen told ABC. “The FBI is smart for putting this warning out so that state and locals can be better able to prepare and respond to these types of threats. Information like this is critically important for law enforcement.”

In a separate warning, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Wednesday threatened to attack U.S. tech companies like Google and Nvidia, both of which are headquartered in California.

Donald Trump claims that white South Africans face persecution and set up a refugee program to help them immigrate to the United States last year, a remarkable exception in his ban on all other refugees. But in reality, many of them are now returning to South Africa.

In November, the South African government set up a portal for people to check their citizenship status after repealing a law that revoked the citizenship of some South Africans who left the country. So far, 12,000 people have used the portal, and at least 1,000 people have reclaimed their citizenship, the country’s Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber ​told Reuters.

“There is definitely a sense of optimism for South Africans abroad,” Schreiber told Reuters. He’s part of the white-led Democratic Alliance party, which has ruled in coalition with the dominant African National Congress for the last two years.

Many of those returning to South Africa are leaving the United States, citing the political situation under the Trump administration. “People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed,” 53-year-old Andrew Veitch told Reuters, referring to ICE’s attacks in Minneapolis and elsewhere. “I don’t want to live in a place like this.” Veitch, who moved to California in 2003 after being held up at gunpoint in his car, plans to move back to South Africa later this year.

Trump’s program has taken in 3,500 South Africans since it began in May 2025, with applicants complaining to Reuters that they were victims of racially motivated crime and job discrimination due to employment equity laws attempting to correct decades of racial apartheid that disenfranchised South Africa’s Black majority.

Statistically speaking, though, the unemployment rate in South Africa is 35 percent for Black people as opposed to 8 percent for whites, according to government data. Farm murders, an issue that Trump has highlighted using false information, are actually higher for Black South Africans, as well.

Despite Trump’s best efforts, recruitment agencies are seeing increases in white South Africans overseas interested in finding jobs in the country. Others are interested in returning due to the lower cost of living and scoff at Trump’s claim that they would face a “genocide.”

Greg Bovino may no longer be atop the U.S. Border Patrol, but documents leaked to The American Prospect suggest there’s still a sea change inside the organization being pushed by his cronies.

One such memo, sent during Border Patrol’s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, advises agents how to smash car windows and extract suspects from their cars while minimizing harm—and protecting the agent from legal responsibility.

“Courts evaluate the totality of the circumstances: no single factor is determinative. Your detailed articulation of the event, including prescribed threats and rationale for actions, is crucial for legal defensibility,” the memo reads.

While physically dragging people through a car’s shattered window may be excessive, the memo adds that “breaking a window to remove the driver or passenger may ultimately become necessary.

Another section of the document says to “ensure lethal coverage is available, if necessary, in accordance with use of force policy.” It was written in November 2025, a month before agents from Border Patrol and ICE began pouring into Minnesota, where they would eventually kill two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

A different memo dated February 9 addresses the revocation of a 2022 safety guidance that prohibited Border Patrol from arresting noncitizens in rivers and while they were physically on the border fence, as well as forcing them back into those dangerous areas while pursuing them. The safety guidance also forbade agents from forcing noncitizens back to the Mexican side of the border once they had crossed.

The February memo happily remarked that the 2022 safety guidance had been repealed. “Rescinding this policy restores agents’ authority to interdict, apprehend, and rescue individuals engaged in illegal crossings,” it reads.

The memos show how Bovino and his disciples altered Border Patrol protocol from the inside, away from public scrutiny. The Prospect identified seven different Border Patrol agents who tagged along with Bovino from his post in El Centro, California, to help him carry out this new, increasingly violent agenda.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is banning press photographers from department briefings on the U.S. war on Iran because he didn’t like the way he looked in recent photos.

Anonymous sources told The Washington Post that Hegseth and his staff called photos of him taken by photographers from large outlets like Reuters, the Associated Press, and Getty Images at a March 2 briefing “unflattering.”

“In order to use space in the Pentagon Briefing Room effectively, we are allowing one representative per news outlet if uncredentialed, excluding pool,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement. “Photographs from the briefings are immediately released online for the public and press to use. If that hurts the business model for certain news outlets, then they should consider applying for a Pentagon press credential.” Photographers have been kept out of the past two briefings since.

When Post reporter Scott Nover emailed the White House Press Office asking plainly why the Pentagon wasn’t allowing photographers into press briefings, deputy press secretary Anna Kelly replied, “Didn’t The Washington Post just fire all of its White House photographers?”

It’s unclear what photo set Hegseth off, or if this is just another excuse to kick more journalists out of the Pentagon. It’s a sensitive move for an extremely public figure who used to be on television frequently.

Donald Trump is pulling out all of the stops to get rid of one of his only Republican critics. 

The president is traveling to Kentucky Wednesday to campaign against Representative Thomas Massie, who not only voted against Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” but has also been a thorn in Trump’s side over the Jeffrey Epstein files and the Iran war. 

Trump is visiting Hebron, Kentucky, just outside of Cincinnati, ostensibly to talk about the economy, but it just happens to be in Massie’s district. Ahead of the visit, Trump doubled down on his endorsement of Massie’s primary opponent, farmer and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. Meanwhile, a super PAC aligned with the president has already spent $2.6 million on the race.  

In a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, Trump mocked Massie, making a prediction that “‘Representative’ Thomas Massie will go down as the WORST Republican Congressman in the long and fabled history of the United States Congress.” Massie responded on X with a sarcastic prediction of his own, noting how Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Trump’s feud with Massie goes back months, and he’s hoping that he can single-handedly convince the conservatives in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, a safe Republican seat. But Massie has endured Trump’s threats and withstood a highly funded attempt by pro-Israel interests to unseat him in 2024. 

Those same interests have gotten involved in this race, with the Republican Jewish Committee Victory Fund producing an ad presenting the primary contest as a choice between “Gallrein and Trump or Massie, who stands with Iran.” The ad shows Massie alongside Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Democratic Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who happen to be Muslims. Will that plus Trump’s efforts be enough to unseat Massie? 

It appears that the Defense Department downplayed the severity of the retaliatory strike that killed six U.S. service members in Kuwait.

In addition to those killed two weeks ago, more than 30 military members were hospitalized by an Iranian drone strike on a makeshift tactical operations center in Kuwait, with dozens suffering from injuries, including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma, multiple sources told CBS News.

Of the 25 service members transported to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, 20 arrived on a C-17 military transport aircraft with injuries designated as “urgent” and requiring immediate evacuation. More than 100 medical personnel were dispatched to Landstuhl to assist in the surge of patients, one of the sources told CBS.

Additionally, 12 service members were hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and one was sent to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Iran targeted the makeshift operations center in the early hours of the U.S. and Israel’s aerial bombing campaign. The U.S. military personnel stationed there reportedly received no counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar defense; didn’t get the drone defense systems they asked for; and didn’t hear the warning sirens in time.

The next day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the deadly strike in Kuwait “a squirter,” and later complained that reporting on the troops killed was a ploy to make the president look bad.

The Defense Department did not release information about how many were hurt in the strike. U.S. Central Command initially claimed that five had been seriously wounded. “Several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions—and are in the process of being returned to duty,” the post on social media read.

The Pentagon has a process by which it notifies families of wounded soldiers, and seeks to prevent them from learning about injuries in press releases.

The strike in Kuwait has presented an early flashpoint for the president’s illegal war in Iran, which seems to have no end date or clear objective. New revelations about the scale of injuries and destruction should raise questions about the Pentagon’s transparency—or lack thereof.

Just one day after The Wall Street Journal discovered that Donald Trump was urging everyone in his presidential Cabinet to wear the same style of Florsheim shoes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was caught red-footed in a pair of Florsheims about two sizes too big.

The Oxfords cost $145 and became an obsession of Trump’s last year. The Journal reported that the president has personally ordered pairs for many of his advisers, including Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Commerce Secretary (and noted Epstein affiliate) Howard Lutnick. Sometimes, the shoes come in boxes adorned with Trump’s signature.

“All the boys have them,” said a female White House official.

“It’s hysterical, because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” another official remarked.

Vance recalled that he and Rubio were given Florsheims after the president told them they were wearing “shitty shoes” at an Oval Office meeting in December. Trump proceeded to pull out a catalog and asked the men for their shoe sizes, Vance said.

But the vice president must be misremembering, because the Florsheims Rubio was photographed wearing Tuesday were clearly too big for him. The Journal also reported that Trump likes to guess people’s shoe sizes in front of them, so maybe that’s what actually happened.

As a few internet commenters noted, this begs the question of why Rubio just didn’t exchange the pair for the correct size of Florsheims, so he could have a shoe that fits while still showing respect to Dear Leader.

Maybe Rubio didn’t think that far ahead, or maybe Trump made him put the shoes on in front of him in some insanely sad show of fealty. In any case, Little Marco should invest in some blister cream.

Democrats pulled off a massive upset in a special election Tuesday for a New Hampshire state House seat, with Bobbi Boudman defeating Republican Dale Fincher 51 percent to 47 percent in Carroll County district 7—which Donald Trump won by nine points in 2024.

This was Boudman’s third attempt to win the seat, having lost the same election in 2024 by 13.6 points.

“Tuesdays are becoming a headache for state Republicans across the country as they suffer one stunning defeat after another,” Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee president Heather Williams said after the victory.

“Representative-elect Boudman ran a remarkable campaign focused on solutions to the problems that families in New Hampshire are facing, from the rising cost of electricity, utilities, and groceries to the health care crisis caused by Trump’s ‘Big Ugly Bill.’ This win is yet another warning sign to Republicans across the country, and a new reality is now sinking in: no Republican seat is safe,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “From now until November, Democrats are keeping our foot on the gas and organizing and competing everywhere, including to flip the New Hampshire House and take back power across the country.”

According to The Downballot, Democrats have now flipped a district in a special election for the tenth time since President Trump returned to office. If alarms weren’t already going off for the GOP ahead of this year’s midterms, they certainly are now.