Iran Destroys U.S. Missile Defenses as Trump Insists Everything’s Fine

Iran has systematically destroyed U.S. missile defense systems across the Middle East over the last 13 days, opting to surgically dismantle the eyes and ears of America’s regional defense systems rather than go toe-to-toe with the country’s raw firepower.

The Pentagon confirmed that Iran’s military hit Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, wrecking a radar system valued at $300 million.

“The AN-TPY/2 radar is essentially the heart of the THAAD battery, enabling the launch of interceptor missiles and contributing to a networked air defense picture,” munitions specialist N.R. Jenzen-Jones told CNN last week. “It also happens to be an incredibly expensive piece of kit.”

THAAD is short for terminal high-altitude area defense. Paired with an AN-TPY/2 radar, the tech is capable of locating incoming missiles and translating an interception point to American rockets. Destroying the radars removes America’s ability to detect and interpret the flight path of an incoming missile, leaving the military’s missile defense systems useless.

“The loss of even a single radar of this type would be an operationally significant event,” Jenzen-Jones said. “It is probable that a replacement unit would have to be redeployed from elsewhere, which will take time and effort.”

The rapid depletion of missiles has been a growing problem since Israel and the U.S. opened fire on Iran on February 28.

U.S. military officials have stressed that fighting Iran has drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

In the days since, EU defense officials have warned that the U.S. is no longer capable of supplying missiles to its allies amid its war with Iran, stressing that the continent would need to develop its own missile manufacturing sector in order to adequately fill their supply without Washington’s help.

One source told CNN last week that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles in order to fend off the drones.

Earlier this week, it became clear that the White House had months earlier been offered the opportunity to buy tech that would have given U.S. forces a dramatic advantage against Iran. The offer was extended by Ukraine, and the the intel was battle-proven: Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”).

The decision to snub the offer has since been discussed as one of the biggest miscalculations thus far in the Iran war.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”

This sounds like a direct, long-term pitch to the GOP from a CEO whose tech firm already has numerous government contracts and is deeply embedded in the Pentagon. Karp’s message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies—liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working-class men—more political power to transfer to you. He’s aligning his technology with both GOP political strategy and the larger male-centered culture war that the right has been waging for the better part of a decade now. And how exactly would his technology only hurt Democrat women?

Karp also made a Patriot Act–era argument, justifying his admittedly “dangerous” technology by claiming that Palantir will allow us to “be American” in the future.

“These technologies are dangerous societally,” Karp continued. “The only justification you could possibly have would be that if we don’t do it, our adversaries will do it. And we will be subject to their rule of law.… Why is it that we’re absorbing the risk of disrupting the very fabric of our society, including the most powerful parts of our society, if it’s not because it’s about maintaining our ability to be American in the near term and long term?”

The Pentagon estimates that it spent more than $11.3 billion in the first week of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran. And every cent of that was spent without congressional approval.

During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Pentagon officials told lawmakers that the cost of the first six days of America’s aerial bombing campaign exceeded $11.3 billion—not including the cost of the buildup ahead of the strikes, multiple outlets reported.

The Pentagon previously estimated it spent $5.6 billion on munitions alone during the first two days of the war—significantly dwarfing the Pentagon’s preliminary cost estimate of $1 billion per day. Some GOP lawmakers said they’d received estimates that were closer to $2 billion per day.

Elaine McCusker, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense during the first Trump administration, estimated that it cost an additional $630 million to assemble the largest force of U.S. military assets to the Middle East in decades before the first shot was even fired.

Meanwhile, Tomahawk cruise missiles, like the one the U.S. military reportedly used in a deadly strike on an Iranian girls’ primary school, cost $2.2 million each. It may be worth keeping these figures in mind as the Trump administration argues it doesn’t have enough money to make health care more affordable.

This exorbitant spending on a military campaign the American people do not support and their representatives did not authorize cancels out billions supposedly saved by sweeping cost-cutting measures. In order to fund his war, Trump has laid waste to federal programs.

Let’s do some quick math: The $1.1 billion Trump rescinded from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the $7 billion from foreign aid, added to the $2.7 billion gutted from medical research and the $500 million slashed from food banks, is roughly equivalent to the $11.3 billion the Trump administration has spent bombing Iran.

Or to put it more simply: In his first year back in office, Trump disrupted at least $12 billion toward K-12 education. Rather than fund schools, the U.S. bombed them.

Donald Trump is trying to spin skyrocketing oil prices caused by the war in Iran as good for the U.S.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday morning, suggesting that Americans would see economic benefits as gas prices shoot up.

That may be true for American gas and oil companies, but Americans who don’t work in that industry aren’t likely to see any of those companies’ profits. In fact, they will likely get sticker shock when they go to fill up their cars, with gas prices already exceeding $5 a gallon in California.

But on some level, Trump knows that high oil prices aren’t good for the U.S., at least from a political standpoint. On Wednesday, Trump said he would open the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and release 172 million barrels of oil to help bring prices down.

“We’ll do that, and then we’ll fill it up,” Trump told a local Cincinnati TV station. “I filled it up once, and I’ll fill it up again. But right now, we’ll reduce it a little bit, and that brings the prices down.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the releases will begin next week and take about 120 days. The reserve is about 59 percent full, with the Trump administration replenishing only small amounts of oil. The last time it was tapped was by President Biden in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Iran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz and blocked all ships, including oil tankers, from entering or leaving. The country is actually exporting more of its own oil than it was before the war, making a tidy profit itself.

Right now, the 20 million barrels of crude oil that usually traverse through the strait are stuck thanks to an Iranian blockade reinforced by sea mines. The U.S. typically consumes a similar amount of crude oil each day. If the strait doesn’t reopen soon, the stocks of American oil producers might gain value, but the average American will end up having to spend a massive chunk of their paycheck on gas, causing a ripple effect that will further hurt the economy.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced on Wednesday that his agents will be training with UFC fighters, further solidifying the sport’s connection to the right wing and raising more questions as to what exactly Patel does all day.

“I’m thrilled to announce this historic seminar between the FBI and the UFC at Quantico,” Patel said in a statement. “This is a tremendous opportunity for our FBI agents to learn and train with some of the greatest athletes on earth—helping the world’s premier law enforcement agency be even better prepared to protect the American people.”

The training will occur this weekend at the FBI Academy in Quantico, after Patel proposed the collaboration last year. UFC CEO Dana White has also been a vocal supporter of President Trump, and there is set to be a UFC event on the White House lawn this summer.

The news follows a rough news cycle for Patel, in which he came under scrutiny for downing beer with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team while the FBI was in the middle of the missing persons search for Savannah Guthrie. This UFC training session, his frequent jet flights on the taxpayers’ dime, his jacket meltdown, and his girlfriend’s security detail all suggest that Patel is more concerned with the perks of the job than the actual job.

Having Iranian sleeper cells floating around the country is apparently no big deal to the president.

Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday that he was well aware of the foreign chaos agents’ locations, though he didn’t express any immediate plans to do anything about it. Instead, he regurgitated his typical talking points, opting to heap responsibility for the problem onto former President Joe Biden rather than address the potentially dangerous situation directly as America’s current leader.

“Have you been briefed about how many Iran sleeper cells there could be inside the U.S. right now?” asked a journalist.

“I have been, and a lot of people came in through Biden with the stupid open border. But we know where most of them are, we’ve got our eye on all of them—I think,” Trump said.

“They came in through the open border policies of sleepy Joe Biden, one of the worst—the worst president—in the history of our country. We’ve got our eyes on all of them, but the war itself is being prosecuted at a level that nobody has seen before. It’s pretty amazing to watch,” Trump added.

Another reporter questioned Trump about a leaked FBI memo that indicated Iran could exact revenge on the U.S. by way of an offshore boat off the coast of California, potentially ushering a drone swarm to the country’s Pacific coast.

But Trump was remarkably cavalier in his reply.

“It’s being investigated, but you have a lot of things happening, and all we can do is take them as they come.”

He then took a moment to fluff himself up for wielding America’s enormous military against Iran, an act of war that has yet to be approved by Congress.

“The war itself is being prosecuted as well as anybody has ever seen, and this is other countries telling me too,” Trump repeated. “Big countries, powerful countries, they said they’ve never seen anything like it. And they also agree with what I’m doing. They say it’s an evil country, and it’s been for 47 years that way.”

Senator John Fetterman appeared not to understand why Democrats want to investigate the deadly strike that killed dozens of Iranian children. 

During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Wednesday night, Fetterman was asked to explain why he hadn’t signed onto a letter from Senate Democrats that questioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, a girls’ primary school miles from Tehran. The strike killed 175 people, many of them young girls.

“Well, because we all agree that it’s a tragedy having the school hit, and we all agree now for an investigation,” Fetterman said. “What I don’t agree with the rest of my colleagues in the House is that it’s a war of choice, or it’s dumb, or all the things my colleagues have described, you know, this operation. I think it’s a good thing, and I support that.”

Fetterman was referring to a line in the letter describing Donald Trump’s military campaign as “a war of choice without Congressional authorization.” The letter did not describe the war as “dumb.”

Fetterman noted that the Pentagon was already investigating the strike. A preliminary report determined that the deadly attack was the result of a targeting error by the U.S. military as it conducted a strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base next door.

“It seems that they’ve already acknowledging all those things. I think largely that letter, it was rendered moot at this point, after what has already come out,” he said.  

Fetterman added: “I would remind everybody listening right now, the United States never, ever targets civilians. Iran does.”

But that’s exactly why an investigation is necessary: to ensure that the Pentagon took all necessary steps to prevent civilian casualties. In the letter, Senate Democrats pressed Hegseth to provide details on the analysis conducted on the building before the strike, the use of artificial intelligence, the role of civilian harm mitigation, and the Pentagon’s compliance with rules to prevent war crimes. 

Fetterman is naïvely—or callously—giving the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt while the U.S. and Israel bomb schools, hospitals, cultural heritage sites, and residential areas with impunity.

Fetterman ranted that the “left media” seemed to care much more “about this hospital” than about Iran massacring “tens of thousands of their young people.” (Some of us are old enough to remember when Fetterman cheerleaded Israel killing thousands of young people in Gaza.)

“Whether it’s The New York Times, they’re making it more and more, trying to convince America that this has been a disaster or things are out of control, and that’s just categorically untrue,” he said. 

When Collins tried to explain why the media would cover a strike that killed dozens of schoolchildren, Fetterman became defensive.

“It is appropriate to cover it, you know, it’s a tragedy, absolutely. And if we were on it, it’s appropriate to apologize,” he said, looking defeated. 

Donald Trump’s call with G7 leaders Wednesday left them confused about what the president wants from the Iran war.

Trump sent mixed signals to the leaders of the world’s seven leading economies in a video call hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, unnamed sources told Axios. These sources said that Trump was “ambiguous and noncommittal,” leaving some on the call thinking that he wants a quick end to hostilities, while others thought that he was digging in for a long war.

“It will be up to the president of the United States to clarify both his final objectives and the pace he intends to give to the operations,” Macron said following the call.

Trump’s public comments on Wednesday outside of the call haven’t cleared things up. He told Axios that the war with Iran was going to end “soon,” claiming that “there is practically nothing left” to target in the country. But while leaving the White House for a rally in Kentucky, he said the U.S. was “not done” attacking Iran. When he was asked what more the military had to do, he replied, “More of the same.”

At the rally, Trump told his supporters, “You never like to say too early you won. We won. In the first hour it was over.” Minutes later, he contradicted himself, saying, “We don’t want to leave early, do we? We gotta finish the job, right?”

Yet again, the president is showing us that he is making up his plans for Iran as he goes along. Is destroying the country’s nuclear program the goal, or is it regime change? And what is he going to do about the state of oil prices now that Iran has seized the Strait of Hormuz? The rest of the world will have to keep guessing as more and more people are killed.

Former slumlord President Donald Trump reportedly told Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a [bleep] about housing.”

Punchbowl News reported that Trump told Johnson this in private conversation earlier this week, and the House speaker then relayed it to a small committee of GOP leadership on Tuesday. The report was based on four sources who heard Johnson recount his conversation with the president as he tried to convey that a housing bill isn’t nearly as important as the SAVE Act, the GOP plan to force every American to prove their citizenship to vote—a blatant voter-suppression attempt.

Americans absolutely give a shit about housing. There are hundreds of thousands of people sleeping on the street every night. Many millennials and Gen Zers can’t afford to pay rent in this country, much less buy a house—making sure that the central tenet of the so-called “American dream” will never be a reality.

Trump himself campaigned on a kind of economic populism and uplifting the American working class (while blaming immigrants in the process, of course). And while his grift has been obvious to some for a while, millions of Americans actually believed in him and voted for him. At least now they have something showing them he couldn’t care less.

“Americans don’t give a shit about housing costs. They want DC to prioritize policies that actually improve their everyday lives,” Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote sarcastically. “Such as disenfranchising people who lack passports, putting a new Khamenei in charge of Iran, and making the Kennedy Center’s programming less woke.”

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly paid a settlement to a woman who also accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her. 

Representative Ro Khanna told PBS News Hour’s Ali Rogin Wednesday that Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, confirmed that the alleged sex trafficker’s estate had made a payment to a woman who accused both Epstein and Trump. Kahn did not say how much the settlement was, or when it was paid, during his deposition in front of the House Oversight Committee earlier in the day. 

“If it was fake, then why was she paid a settlement? There must be some validity to it,” Khanna said, according to Rogin. “Now, I’m not saying validity necessarily against Donald Trump. Maybe it was against Epstein. But he did confirm that there was a settlement payout.”

Khanna said that the Oversight Committee was “exploring” interviewing this woman as part of its investigation into Trump’s ties to Epstein. 

It wasn’t immediately clear which survivor of Epstein’s abuse Khanna was referring to. 

Buried in the FBI’s massive trove of documents were multiple interviews with a woman who claimed Trump had forced her to perform oral sex, punched her in the head, and raped her when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The woman, according to her testimony to the FBI, was abused by Epstein for years, and was harassed into silence for years after the abuse ended.  

The Department of Justice had previously removed the record of this woman’s FBI interviews from its Epstein database. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the rereleased testimony amounted to “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.”

Last week, the FBI released a memo detailing an interview with yet another victim of Epstein’s who claimed Trump was on speakerphone while she was being abused.