Trump Says Netanyahu Promises to “Low-Key It” Now

Donald Trump’s solution to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continuing to bomb Lebanon, and thus threatening to upend the entire ceasefire with Iran, is to ask him to tone it down.

Trump spoke to Netanyahu on the phone Wednesday, a senior administration official told NBC News, and told him to pull back. Trump later told the network in an interview Thursday that Israel would be “scaling back” its attacks on Lebanon.

“I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it. I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key,” Trump said.

What that means is anyone’s guess. Lebanon was supposed to be included in the 10-point ceasefire deal, according to Iran and mediator Pakistan. Netanyahu said Wednesday that he “insisted that the temporary ceasefire with Iran not include Hezbollah, and we continue to strike them forcefully,” and following more bombs on Thursday, claimed his government is ready to negotiate directly with the Lebanese government (but not till next week).

These negotiations, Al Jazeera reports, are the result of U.S. pressure. The Trump administration is requesting a pause on Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon to help negotiations with Iran. But Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday that “the war will not be stopped,” even after Netanyahu’s announcement of negotiations with Lebanon.

Israeli strikes killed over 300 people in southern Lebanon Wednesday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, with over 1,000 wounded. At least seven people were killed in the southern Lebanese town of Abbassiyeh on Thursday. Democrats and leaders around the world have condemned Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon. Is Trump really going to let Netanyahu just “low-key it” and wait to see what happens next?

A Democratic National Committee panel on Thursday killed a resolution condemning the “growing influence” of dark money groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—even as an overwhelming majority of Democrat voters have an unfavorable view of the country that has committed genocide in Gaza, started a war in Iran, and continues to bomb civilians in Lebanon.

“The use of massive outside spending to support or oppose candidates based on their positions regarding international conflicts or foreign governments raises concerns about undue influence over democratic debate and policymaking, potentially constraining elected officials’ ability to represent the views of their constituents,” read the nonbinding resolution.

At least two potential 2028 Democratic nominees may have played a role in killing the resolution, with one DNC member telling Politico they received direct calls from the presidential hopefuls expressing concern about the resolution.

The DNC resolutions committee also punted on two other resolutions on recognizing a Palestinian state and conditioning military aid to Israel.

It’s clear that the Democratic establishment is not ready to let go of AIPAC, even as Israel’s genocide on Gaza and influence on American politics has become perhaps the defining progressive issue of this era. AIPAC wouldn’t be spending millions of dollars every year trying to oust progressive Democrats if that wasn’t the case. And while public opinion continues to shift sharply against it, party leadership continues to squirm and offer nonanswers when confronted with that reality.

The bombs began raining down in Iran on February 28. Israel had successfully convinced Donald Trump to launch a joint attack on the Gulf nation. There was just one thing that the White House had forgotten about: half a dozen U.S. cadets who were working just off the coast, sitting ducks in the Persian Gulf.

Five privately owned ships flying the U.S. flag were nearby carrying students from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine, and the transportation industry when the U.S. military started the war in Iran, NOTUS reported Thursday.

Unlike previous conflicts, there was no advance word or warning to the ships to evacuate, effectively trapping them as the violence began.

“Nobody told them. They were caught unawares,” one source close to the situation told NOTUS. “It was very strange that [officials] weren’t even given a whiff, weren’t even given an indication.”

The military had no plan to transport the vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the students were forced to find safe refuge in harbors around the Gulf, living on their ships. They were evacuated a month later, three sources told NOTUS, though it is not known whether all the students have made it back to American soil.

“If they’d had even just a day’s notice, they could have gotten them out,” another person familiar with the situation told NOTUS.

But the cadets weren’t the only Americans in the region that the White House forgot.

The Trump administration also failed to properly notify regional embassy staff of the impending bloodshed that week. In an email delivered February 27, Ambassador Mike Huckabee gave nonemergency workers at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem less than 24 hours to exit Israel, informing them that anyone planning to leave the country “should do so TODAY.”

The order and its timeline were highly unusual: Embassy staff are typically provided several days’ notice in order to comply with state-mandated evacuations, with some warnings given as much as a month in advance of the anticipated departure date. By comparison, Huckabee’s 24-hour deadline was shockingly short.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed the release of a report showing that the Covid-19 vaccine cut hospitalizations and emergency room visits for healthy adults by half last winter.

The Washington Post reports that acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya made the decision because he was purportedly concerned about the report’s methodology, even though it has been used by the agency for years to examine vaccine effectiveness for other respiratory viruses like the flu.

In fact, the agency published a similar report about the flu vaccine with the same methodology on March 12 in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The Covid-19 vaccine report had cleared the CDC’s scientific review process, and was scheduled to be published in the MMWR before Bhattacharya’s decision.

The same methodology is also used to evaluate vaccines by numerous medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, the Lancet, and Pediatrics, according to the Post.

The newspaper obtained a copy of the report, which states that between September and December 2025, healthy adults who got the vaccine cut their likelihood of visiting urgent care or the emergency room by 50 percent and of Covid-related hospital stays by 55 percent, compared to those who didn’t get a Covid vaccine in 2025.

Bhattacharya was a staunch critic of the CDC’s Covid-19 response, calling for an early end to lockdowns in the “Great Barrington Declaration” he helped write, and said that calling for masking was “pseudoscience.” However, he did tell a Senate committee in February that he didn’t think vaccines cause autism.

On the other hand, Bhattacharya’s boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a longtime anti-vax activist, calling the Covid-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made” in 2021. Last year, Kennedy announced that the CDC would no longer recommend the vaccine to healthy pregnant women and children.

In Trump’s second term, vaccination has been discouraged, resulting in rising and more severe illnesses. Meanwhile, the administration, under the thrall of Kennedy’s MAHA pseudoscience, is burying anything that proves their ideology wrong.

U.S. immigration judges have essentially been told that they cannot grant asylum to immigrants, The New York Times reported Thursday.

In a previously unreported whistleblower letter to Congress, a military lawyer who served as a temporary immigration judge before being fired, quoted an official who’d offered a frank—and dark—description of the standard for granting asylum under the Trump administration: “Maybe if you were Jewish and escaping Nazi Germany in 1943, you should get it.”

Illegally denying immigrants their lawful pathway to citizenship is just one way that President Donald Trump transformed the country’s immigration court system into the engine of his mass deportation agenda. Since Trump reentered office, his administration has carried out an unprecedented purge of the country’s immigration judges, culling 100 judges from a body of about 750 officials, according to the Times.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to replace these officials with a class of so-called “deportation judges” and has announced the appointment of 143 permanent and temporary judges, many of whom previously worked as immigration prosecutors or military lawyers. As a result, deportation rates have skyrocketed and the number of successful asylum claims has seen a precipitous drop.

An analysis by the Times found that many of the judges who were fired under the Trump administration had been appointed under Democratic administrations, and tended to approve more asylum cases than their peers. Some immigration courts, such as one in San Francisco, that were viewed as friendly to asylum claims were shuttered altogether. Judges who were fired as part of Trump’s purge approved about 46 percent of asylum claims, while those who remained approved roughly 15 percent.

By comparison, the administration’s new hires have approved roughly 6 percent, according to an analysis by the Times.

The Trump administration wanted immigration judges to act as “puppets for the administration with a singular goal of deporting as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” Shuting Chen, an immigration judge who was dismissed last November, told the Times.

The immigration judges who remain have found themselves in a precarious position. More than two dozen immigration judges who spoke with the Times said they felt pressure to go along with the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda or risk losing their jobs.

Last June, a memo from a top DHS official accused certain judges of tolerating bias so long as it was “in favor of an alien,” and warned that judges who favored one side “may be subject to corrective or disciplinary action.”

“All of us are looking over our shoulders,” said Holly D’Andrea, an immigration judge in Texas who spoke with the Times in her capacity as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges union.