Trump Says Iran Shouldn’t Be at World Cup as He Bombs the Country

Donald Trump issued a veiled threat to Iran Thursday, but not one directly related to the war: It concerns their men’s national soccer team.

“The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on Truth Social. The odious message comes after FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, met with Trump Wednesday and reportedly got his assurance that the Iranian team would be welcome.

Last year, Iran became the first team to qualify for this summer’s World Cup, which will be hosted by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Tensions between Iran and the U.S. have been high since the start of the Islamic Republic in 1979, and Iran’s soccer team arriving in the U.S. was guaranteed to result in a charged atmosphere.

But after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran and ignited a war 13 days ago, the country’s participation in the World Cup was suddenly placed in doubt. How would Iran’s soccer team travel to a country it is at war with, let alone be able to train? The president of Iran’s soccer federation said early on in the war that “what is certain is that after this attack, we cannot be expected to look forward to the World Cup with hope.”

Trump responded with indifference. “I really don’t care” if Iran participates, he told Politico last week. “I think Iran is a very badly defeated country. They’re running on fumes.” Iran is also part of the Trump administration’s travel ban, preventing many of its citizens from coming to the U.S. and seeing them play, although there is a carve-out for the team and support personnel.

In December, the State Department didn’t grant visas for all of the Iranian officials who planned to attend the World Cup draw in Washington, D.C. Iran threatened to boycott the ceremony, prompting FIFA, the international soccer governing body, to step in. This time, though, Iran’s sports minister said Wednesday that the country would not be competing.

“Given that this corrupt government assassinated our leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], there are no conditions which allow us to participate in the World Cup,” Ahmad Donyamali said on Iranian state television. If Iran follows through and doesn’t take part, it would face a heavy fine and possible ban from future international competitions.

Iran was drawn in Group G in the tournament, and is scheduled to play New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21 in Inglewood, California, not far from Los Angeles’s massive Iranian diaspora community, nicknamed “Tehrangeles.” But the odds are narrowing that they would get to see the team play live.

Aside from the Iran question (and the badly planned war), the Trump administration has badly managed preparations for the World Cup. Host cities haven’t received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for security, leading to a cancellation of public fan fests across the country. Vice President JD Vance and White House adviser Stephen Miller have threatened to deploy ICE agents to World Cup stadiums, raising the possibility of protests, violence, and mass arrests. Is that the threat to the Iranian national team’s “life and safety” that Trump is referring to?

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.