Iran Calls B.S. as Trump Claims Iran Talks Are Underway

After four weeks of useless threats, bombings, and death, President Trump is placing a five-day pause on his war on Iran after failing to attain the “unconditional surrender” that he claimed he would earlier this month.

“I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST,” Trump wrote Monday morning on Truth Social. The announcement came just two hours before U.S. stock markets opened, and Trump noted the pause in strikes will last the duration of the trading week. The decision caused previously skyrocketing oil prices to dip significantly.

“BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS,” Trump continued.

This move—at least somewhat of a surrender—will surely anger Israelis and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and war hawks like Senator Tom Cotton.

However, an Iranian official told Fars News Agency that Iran’s government had “no direct contact with Trump, not even through intermediaries. Trump retreated after hearing that our targets would be all power plants in West Asia.” This directly contradicts Trump’s claim and raises serious doubts as to whether the president is telling the truth or just saying whatever he can to stop gas prices from rising more and more as Iran locks down the Strait of Hormuz.

“Every week, when markets open, Trump makes these kinds of statements to drive down oil prices. Even his five-day deadline aligns with the closure of the energy market,” Iranian academic Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who is closely linked to the government, wrote on X. “But in reality, there are no negotiations underway, nor does Trump have the capability to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s firm threat has once again forced Trump to back down.”

When Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman was elected in 2023, the Democratic Party thought it might have a new kind of leader. The gruff, hoodie-wearing Fetterman was able to win over the working class in the country’s most important swing state and defeat his Republican challenger, Mehmet Oz, despite suffering a stroke in the middle of the campaign.

As it turns out, the Democratic establishment was right—just not in the way they thought.

Since Fetterman’s election, his net approval with Pennsylvania Democrats has dropped 108 points, from +68 in 2023 to -40 in 2026, as CNN’s Harry Enten reported Friday.

“He’s down there with the Titanic,” Enten said. “There’s no historical analog to his unpopularity.”

Fetterman’s unpopularity is easily explained: Since taking office, he has drifted hard to the right, for reasons largely unknown. He is often the lone Democrat who votes alongside the GOP, for instance when he voted to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security in February or to advance GOP Senator Markwayne Mullin’s nomination for secretary of homeland security out of committee last week. He is also probably the most vocally pro-Israel Democrat in the Senate.

It’s a stark change for a politician who formerly championed progressive causes.

Enten noted that Fetterman’s popularity among his own party is worse than that of every single sitting senator who lost a primary this century. He will certainly be a target for replacement when the Pennsylvania Senate primaries occur in 2028.

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy paid for a lavish trip to Puerto Rico using campaign funds, a new report from MeidasTouch has revealed.

Ramaswamy’s campaign paid $11,898.25 to the Dorado Beach Ritz-Carlton Reserve, one of the island’s most lavish resorts, in November. Campaign finance records cite the purpose of the payment as “travel.”

Ramaswamy, who is worth $2.2 billion per Forbes, traveled to the island in preparation to give a keynote speech at ITServe Synergy, an annual conference held in early December by the tech collective ITServe Alliance.

MAGA social media users then deduced that ITServe Alliance was committing the grave sin of advocating for H1-B visas, which allow noncitizens to enter the country to work in specialized fields. Ramaswamy immediately attracted fierce, sometimes racist criticism from his fellow conservatives for speaking at the event.

Ramaswamy caved to the pressure, withdrawing from the event before it began. Bizarrely, a campaign spokesperson then told Signal Ohio that Ramaswamy had planned to be in Puerto Rico regardless of the conference.

So maybe Ramaswamy was planning to go on vacation anyway, and then spontaneously decided to speak at the conference? But wouldn’t that make the use of campaign funds for the trip even more heinous?

It speaks to the selfishness of billionaire Ramaswamy—who also wants to repeal birthright citizenship from undocumented immigrants even though he himself received birthright citizenship—that he would spend thousands in campaign money on a fancy resort so he can play pickleball with Logan and Jake Paul. No, really.

Paolo Zampolli—the man who introduced President Donald Trump to his wife, Melania—requested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detain and deport his ex-girlfriend in an effort to win a custody battle over their son, The New York Times reported Friday. Zampolli denies the reporting.

When Zampolli, a former modeling agent, found out in June that his ex-wife Amanda Ungaro was in a Miami jail for workplace fraud, he took his chance and called David Venturella, a high-ranking ICE official. Venturella then put in a call to ICE’s Miami headquarters to grab Ungaro before she got out on bail. The Times notes that Venturella emphasized that it was a favor for a friend of the president during the call. Ungaro was later deported.

The Times reports that Ungaro may have been deported had her ex not gotten involved, but Zampolli certainly helped speed up the process.

Zampolli insists that he wasn’t asking for Ungaro to be deported. “I asked David what was going on because I did not know the process,” he told the Times.

This is yet another instance of the cronyism that has come to define the Trump administration. There’s no way civilians should be able to use ICE to send personal shots at other people just because they know the president.

The Trump administration is once again suing Harvard University, contending that “for several years, Jewish and Israeli students endured a hostile educational environment” at the Ivy League school.

The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts federal court on Friday and first reported by The Washington Post, alleges that students were stopped from entering campus buildings by “antisemitic demonstrators” in 2023 and 2024, and that some Jewish students felt pressured into wearing baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes. The federal government cites this as evidence that Harvard violated civil rights laws and its own code of conduct by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students.

Harvard rejected the accusations. “We will defend the University against this lawsuit, which represents yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government,” the university wrote in a statement.

As usual with Donald Trump, there is a monetary component to the suit. The federal government wants to “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.”

It’s yet another battle in what has been a long-running war between Trump and the university. Since the start of his second term, Trump has denounced Harvard as an example of an institution infecting American youth with liberal ideas. This has resulted in various social media posts attacking the school, multiple attempts to freeze federal funding for the university, and, of course, frequent claims that Harvard promotes antisemitism and “anti-American” ideology.

For all the administration’s posturing, it has failed to prove in court that the university has done anything wrong.

Trump officials tried to prohibit Harvard from allowing in international students in June before a judge stopped the plan almost immediately. Harvard then won a lawsuit against the administration in September after the latter froze billions in federal funds from the school. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs criticized the administration for having “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

This is the second time the Trump administration has sued Harvard this year. In February, the Justice Department sued the school for allegedly not providing it with its admissions records.