Trump Pivots on His Strait of Hormuz Plan … Again

America’s latest terribly named and extremely risky military operation is back, baby.

President Donald Trump scrapped “Project Freedom” on Tuesday, just two days after unveiling it, after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait expressed concerns and cut off U.S. access to its air bases and airspace.

Under Project Freedom, the U.S. military planned to escort shipping vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, a key trade passageway that has been closed since the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran in late February.

But a few days and phone calls later, the Gulf countries changed their minds. They lifted the airspace restrictions Thursday afternoon, according to multiple U.S. and Saudi officials who spoke to The Wall Street Journal.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had reportedly worried if they helped the U.S. with Project Freedom, Iran would retaliate by striking the Persian Gulf, and that the U.S. may be unwilling or unable to come to their defense after the fact. The Journal called the diplomatic fracas “the biggest dispute in Saudi-American military relations in recent years.”

Adding to the national embarrassment was the fact that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were gloating to press about Project Freedom just hours before Trump tabled the plan.

“As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait,” Hegseth said in a press conference. “American destroyers are on station, supported by hundreds of fighter jets, helicopters, drones, and surveillance aircraft, providing 24/7 overwatch for peaceful commercial vessels.”

It’s not exactly clear why the Gulf countries changed their mind and agreed to support the plan.

Project Freedom will now see U.S. aircraft and naval destroyers attempt to protect commercial ships from Iranian drones and missiles as they try to sail through the Strait. It doesn’t sound like the most relaxing boat ride.

On Thursday, Tennessee Republicans forced through a new congressional map that eliminates the state’s only majority-Black and only Democratic district, prompting protests in the state Capitol.

In a special session, the Tennessee state House of Representatives voted 64–25–3 to approve the new map, which had only been released to the public the day before. Every Democrat voted against the bill along with Republican Representatives John Gillespie and Mark White, whose districts include parts of Memphis divided in the new congressional map. Three other Republicans abstained.

During and after the vote, protesters filled the crowded chamber, shouting and using loud horns. Democratic Representative Justin Jones burned a Confederate flag after leaving the House chamber. Democratic Representative Justin Pearson’s brother, KeShaun Pearson, was arrested by Tennessee State Troopers during the legislative session.

The Senate later passed the new map 25–5, with every Democrat voting against the bill except state Senator Charlane Oliver, who protested the vote by standing at her desk, unveiling a banner reading “No Jim Crow 2.0, stop the TN steal.”

The new map comes after the Supreme Court gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act last week, allowing racial gerrymandering to take place. It now heads to the desk of Republican Governor Bill Lee, who will sign it into law.

The Trump administration wants to take $2 billion away from global health programs to pay to finish closing USAID.

CNN reports that the administration wants to use the money to pay for legal costs, invoices, and asset sales resulting from its closure of the aid agency last year. Congress originally appropriated $1.2 billion of the funds to go to international development, and the rest to go to programs that take on malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, nutrition, global health security, HIV/AIDS, and other world health issues.

Taking away that $2 billion could lead to 121,000 preventable tuberculosis deaths and 47,600 preventable deaths from malaria, according to estimates from the Health Security Policy Academy. It could also lead to 22.9 million children under 5 losing critical nutrition, and 5.7 million women losing safe places for childbirth, according to a CNN source.

This would add to the rising death toll resulting from the closure of USAID. As of November, an estimated 762,000 people have died because of USAID cuts, including over 500,000 children.

The Trump administration told Congress last month that it has reserved over $19.1 billion of USAID funds to shutter the agency. Democrats are demanding that the White House “put the funds to their intended use to save lives and advance U.S. interests as directed by Congress last year.”

“The Administration should immediately begin using these foreign assistance funds to deliver results for the American people. There is no reason for this FY25 funding to be withheld to cover the wasteful costs this Administration has incurred because it chose to dismantle USAID,” 17 Democratic senators wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and acting USAID administrator Eric Ueland.

Disney likes to say it makes dreams come true, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement is making life a nightmare for its workers.

At least 10 crewmembers aboard a Disney Magic cruise were detained by ICE after the ship docked in San Diego late last month, according to immigrant rights groups. The federal agents “stormed onto the vessel” following the five-day trip, wrote The Independent on Wednesday.

While disembarking the ship with her family, passenger Dharmi Mehta said she was stunned to see the ship’s head waiter led away with his hands zip-tied behind his back.

“We got to know him fairly well,” she said at a news conference Tuesday. “He had actually been serving us probably 45 minutes to an hour before he was in restraints.”

Mehta witnessed crewmembers being taken into custody while still wearing Disney uniforms and without their belongings. She said the head waiter had told her he had two daughters, and he was excited to see them once ashore. She called the experience “disheartening and unsettling,” and expressed concern about what would happen to the staff.

The harbor police department told a local NBC outlet it had no part in the raid.

Two days after the raid on the Disney cruise, immigrant rights groups said four crewmembers aboard the MV Zandaam, operated by Holland America, were captured by ICE.

“This is not an isolated incident,” Benjamin Prado of the advocacy group Unión del Barrio said at the Tuesday news conference. “It has become a growing pattern, not only here in San Diego, but throughout this country.”

Prado alleged that the crewmembers were being denied due process and access to their national consulates, crimes the Trump administration has been accused of before.

ICE has alleged the detained individuals are suspected of serious crimes. On Wednesday, spokesperson Sandra Grisolia sent CBS the following:

“HSI San Diego arrested twenty-three crewmembers from multiple cruise ships at the Port of San Diego as part of Operation Tidal Wave. The arrests targeted individuals suspected of involvement with Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), based on information received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The arrestees were transported to Los Angeles for processing, and their visas were revoked.”

An analysis from the CIA has seriously undermined President Donald Trump’s claims about Iran’s economic resilience.

A confidential CIA analysis delivered to policymakers this week found that Iran can survive three or four months of the U.S. military’s blockade before facing more severe economic hardship, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Iran also retains significant ballistic missile capabilities, three U.S. officials familiar with the report told the Post.

Despite weeks of bombing by U.S. and Israeli forces, Iran still has 70 percent of its prewar stockpile of missiles and 75 percent of its mobile launchers, one official said. Iran has also been able to recover its underground storage facilities, repair damaged missiles, and assemble new ones.

The analysis suggests that Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for another 90 to 120 days, casting serious doubt on Trump’s repeated claims about Iran’s supposedly crashing economy.

“They’re failing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday. “They’re currency is worthless, their inflation is probably 150 percent, the real number is 150 percent, they aren’t paying their soldiers, they can’t pay their soldiers, their money is worthless.”

In fact, Trump has been claiming Iran’s economy is in shambles for weeks. “I think Iran is in very bad shape. I think they’re pretty desperate,” he said last month, a week after the blockade was first installed.

The White House has touted the combination of the U.S. military blockade on Iranian ports and the so-called Operation Economic Fury, a series of sanctions on Iran, as rendering serious damage to the country’s economic situation.

But “it’s nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” one person familiar with the CIA’s analysis said of Iran’s economic situation. Tehran has been storing its oil on tanker ships that would otherwise be empty, they told the Post.

Another U.S. official suggested that Iran could extend its economic resilience even further by smuggling oil through overland routes. “There’s a belief they could begin moving some oil via rail through Central Asia,” the official told the Post.

This news comes as Trump has paused Project Freedom, the U.S. military’s plan to help ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz, after losing the support of Saudi Arabia.

Florida is moving to close the infamous “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center in the Everglades because it has grown too expensive to operate, according to The New York Times.

The embattled facility—which has cost the state of Florida $1 million a day to run—has been beset with allegations of unsafe living conditions, abusive treatment, and protests from Native American groups over its environmental harms. Now the facility that was framed as a huge success by President Trump and Governor DeSantis may collapse in failure.

Homeland Security officials have also deemed the facility too costly to keep running, according to a federal official who spoke with the Times, although no official decisions to close it have been made.

Part of this failure can be attributed to Trump leaving DeSantis without any federal funding for the facility’s construction. While the federal government promised to reimburse Florida for hosting the detention center, no payments have yet been made. The swampy location, cruelly touted by Trump as a buffer for detained immigrants, also made it harder for workers to get supplies, sewage—and themselves— to and from the center. And while there has been no official announcement, the closure of Alligator Alcatraz would be an embarrassing development symbolic of the changing public opinion of Trump’s widely unpopular immigration crackdown.  

The Department of Homeland Security and DeSantis’s office have yet to comment on the report. 

It seems that no one is coming to rescue the SAVE Act.

Weeks after Donald Trump stressed to his party that passing that voter restriction bill was the “most important thing” they could do, Senate Republicans have shelved the legislation entirely, unable to bypass the Democratic filibuster that stands in the way of its potential passage, Punchbowl News reported Thursday.

Republicans have tried and failed to pass the SAVE Act multiple times. The latest iteration suggested numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would have abolished mail-in voting, required voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, required voter ID, and mandated voter roll purges every 30 days—an enormous bureaucratic task that would have placed undue burdens on local election officials.

Nonetheless, Trump demanded that his caucus figure it out. In March, Trump insisted that the bill would “guarantee the midterms,” and that there would be “big trouble” if Republicans failed to force it through Congress. The president also said that the SAVE Act was such a tremendous priority that it “supersedes everything else,” threatening to veto all other bills until the SAVE Act made it to his desk.

But a lot can change in two months. Now, even the bill’s most ardent proponents are viewing the SAVE Act as a lost cause, pointing to vote-a-rama held in the Senate last month that failed to get even 50 votes in support of the bill, with four Republicans joining Democrats in their opposition.

Tabling the SAVE Act is expected to anger the party’s base, and could spark renewed calls to scrap the filibuster—something that the bulk of the GOP, and especially its leadership, does not want to do. The issue has raised tensions between Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has thus far resisted Trump’s pleas to ax the long-standing, minority-power rule.

“I completely understand my colleagues who want to maintain the filibuster. We all want to maintain the filibuster, honestly,” Republican Senator Ron Johnson told Punchbowl. “But I know the Democrats won’t. That’s the only division here.”

The wide parameters of the SAVE Act emerged out of unfounded right-wing conspiracies that undocumented immigrants were overwhelmingly participating in U.S. elections, despite the fact that undocumented immigrants (along with legal, non-citizen residents) cannot vote.

Trump already tried and failed to implement voter ID in June. At the time, a federal judge excoriated the president’s efforts, arguing that adding layers of difficulty to the voting process would only serve to harm eligible voters by adding significant barriers before they can cast their ballots.

Saudi Arabia reportedly derailed Donald Trump’s short-lived escort mission in the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump unveiled Project Freedom on Sunday, revealing the U.S. would help ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, he suddenly announced the plan had been immediately put on hold in the hopes of finally cutting a peace deal with Iran.

But Trump only called it quits after Saudi Arabia barred the U.S. military from using its air bases or flying through its airspace, two U.S. officials told NBC News Wednesday.

Officials in Saudi Arabia were surprised by Trump’s announcement of Project Freedom, and not in a good way, the officials told NBC News. Leadership responded by telling the U.S. military it could no longer fly aircraft from the Prince Sultan Airbase, or fly through Saudi airspace to support the effort.

Trump spoke with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but to no avail, the U.S. officials said. As a result, Project Freedom has been put on hold while the president scrambles to restore access to critical airspace.

When asked whether Project Freedom had come as a surprise, a Saudi source told NBC News: “The problem with that premise is that things are happening quickly in real time.”

Meanwhile, a White House official said in a statement that “regional allies were notified in advance.”

U.S. allies weren’t the only ones caught unaware by Trump’s changing plans. His own Cabinet members were singing the praises of Project Freedom just hours before the president chucked it in the waste bin.

Democrats in Congress are investigating whether President Trump’s pardons came with a payout for him.

CBS News reports that Democratic Representatives Dave Min and Raul Ruiz, as well as Senator Peter Welch, have sent letters to over a dozen of the people Trump has pardoned or given some form of clemency, investigating whether they received the clemency “through intermediaries, financial contributions, or other forms of influence.”

The letters note that many of Trump’s pardons have gone to his allies, and the lawmakers asked pardon recipients for contracts showing how much money they paid to lobbyists, social media influencers, lawyers, and others to persuade Trump.

The lawmakers said in the letters that Trump’s pardons and clemency are “depriving victims of compensation and justice,” pointing out an analysis from California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office that found the president’s actions nullified almost $2 billion in recovered money from Medicare and tax fraud, as well as victim repayment.

If the recipients of the letters don’t “respond, they run the risk of highlighting themselves—of being the subjects of future congressional investigations and creating more of a target on their backs for potential further criminal prosecutions,” Min told CBS. He added that Trump’s pardons send the message that people can “get around the justice system,” which “gets to the heart of what is wrong with America right now under this administration.”

Democrats are investigating pardoned financial criminals like Changpeng Zhao, who made billions from cryptocurrency before pleading guilty to money laundering, and Trevor Milton, who was sentenced to four years in prison for securities and wire fraud charges in 2023 for defrauding investors with his electric truck company, Nikola.

Milton owed millions of dollars to his victims, and he’s one of many pardoned by Trump who are now off the hook for the restitution they owe. But since Democrats don’t control Congress right now, they don’t have subpoena power, so these letters carry little—if any—legal weight. In the meantime, Trump can collect rewards from all of the people he has pardoned.

The Justice Department is investigating potential insider trading related to the skyrocketing oil prices caused by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. The department is specifically looking into at least four instances where traders made over $2.6 billion betting that the price of oil would fall moments before it did, according to sources who spoke with ABC News.

According to the London Stock Exchange, traders bet over $500 million that oil prices would drop on March 23, just 15 minutes before Trump announced he’d be pausing his planned attacks on Iran’s power centers. On April 7, traders bet $960 million on oil prices falling. A few hours later, Trump announced a temporary ceasefire. Ten days later, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went on social media to state that the Strait of Hormuz was open—and traders bet $760 million on falling oil prices just 20 minutes before he did. On April 21, traders once again somehow had the awareness to bet $760 million that oil prices would fall just 15 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire extension.

All signs point to someone with insider knowledge using this erratic war to enrich themselves—something the Trump administration has been accused of multiple times.

In January, an unknown Polymarket user bet on the U.S. invading Venezuela and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro being forced out of leadership by January 31, betting more than $33,000 while the odds were only at 6 percent. That trader made $400,000 in less than 24 hours. It was later revealed that the user was a U.S. soldier who was part of the raid on Maduro, and he was charged with “unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain.”

And last year, Trump proclaimed on Truth Social that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for those on China, causing stocks to shoot up.

Observant Americans shouldn’t get their hopes up regarding any actual consequences coming from the probe, as it’s being led by a compromised, biased Justice Department.