Even After “Deal,” the U.S. Is Treating Iran’s Soccer Team Horribly

Iran’s national soccer team is dealing with unnecessary hardship during the World Cup thanks to the Trump administration, with acquiescence from FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.

The team was forced to leave the U.S. immediately after its World Cup match with New Zealand Monday night in Los Angeles, which ended in a hard-fought 2–2 draw, and head back to their Tijuana, Mexico, base camp.

“After the game today they said to us, ‘You have to leave immediately,’” coach Amir Ghalenoi told the press after the match. “Whereas today it’s very important for us to have recovery.

“We’ve been asked to get on a plane and return to our camp in Tijuana, and we are really troubled by that. They are forcing us to go back early. They are making the situation more and more difficult, more hurdles, but we’re not going to let that stop us from doing our best.”

Iran wasn’t even supposed to have its tournament base camp in Mexico. They were forced to abandon their original plans for a base camp in Tucson, Arizona, thanks to the Trump administration, which isn’t letting them stay overnight in the U.S. despite their group stage games taking place in Los Angeles and Seattle. Their fan base is also being punished: Iran’s entire ticket allocation was taken away last week, although it’s not clear if that was a U.S. or FIFA decision.

Before their match, the team had to go through five hours of travel and security checks on Sunday, despite the distance between Tijuana and Los Angeles only being 140 miles.

“We don’t know why they’re returning us, to be honest. I think it’s very strange. It seems like others are doing the planning for us.… We were supposed to arrive two nights before the game, but they didn’t permit [it],” Ghalenoi said. “We were supposed to stay here tonight to recover and return tomorrow lunchtime.

“I think our team is the most oppressed one in the whole World Cup. Our federation isn’t here, our media isn’t here, our management isn’t here.”

The U.S. government initially denied visas to 15 of the Iranian team’s support staff, later reducing that number to 11 after some visas were approved. Those excluded from the U.S. include both of the team’s media officers, analysts, and Iranian Football Federation President Mehdi Taj.

Inexplicably, winger Mehdi Torabi’s visa has also expired, as he was only granted a single entry visa to the U.S., Iranian state media reported. The Iranian federation is scrambling to get Torabi a new one that lets him take part in the remaining matches.

“I think it’s not good for the football,” team captain Mehdi Taremi said of the team’s situation. “In [the] World Cup, you have to prepare good for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and the staff and everyone. But we don’t have that support, and I think FIFA have to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.”

Republican senators are being kept in the dark about the exact terms of Donald Trump’s deal with Iran—and they’re not happy.

The Trump administration has yet to release the text of the memorandum of understanding officials signed with Iran, leaving senior GOP members frustrated at everything they don’t know, Politico reported Monday.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a defense and Iran hawk, voiced concern about discrepancies between different parties’ descriptions of the deal. “The MOU being described by us sounds really very good; the MOU being described by Iran sounds awful,” he told Politico.

The South Carolina Republican fretted that the deal would resemble former President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which defense hawks despised.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as JCPOA. If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal,” he continued, and added in a separate conversation that he was “skeptical that Iran will ever go there.”

It seems that the similarities between Trump’s deal and the JCPOA are already coming into sharp relief: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth crumbled on live television when trying to explain the difference.

Some Republican senators are wary of the deal, believing they will have to review and vote on it.

“If you want a deal to last, it can’t be an executive agreement,” said Oklahoma Senator James Lankford. “We’ve got to have a vote of Congress to be able to solidify [it] long term.”

But others suspect that, like the JCPOA, the deal will be a political agreement.

“They’ll try to write it around the treaty requirements, so I don’t expect we’ll vote on it,” said Texas Senator John Cornyn.

GOP lawmakers aren’t the only ones wary of Trump’s deal with Iran: Even his own Cabinet members seem to hate it. Trump has claimed he will release the text of the deal on Friday, after the formal signing ceremony.

Half the cost of President Trump’s $600 million ballroom will be placed on the shoulders of U.S. taxpayers like you. This development, based on financial records obtained by The Washington Post, comes just two months after Trump promised the project would be “taxpayer free,” with no U.S. citizen paying even “10 cents.”

The ballroom has already eclipsed the $400 million Trump originally said it would cost. And while Trump has defended the necessity of the ballroom profusely, it’s become abundantly clear that this is simply another vanity project for him to feel like he’s actually done something successful, even as there’s no real need or demand for the ballroom—especially not if Americans are paying for $300 million of its price. And the wealthy individuals who are actually paying for it are getting government contract kickbacks for doing so.

“I guess ‘privately funded’ meant Trump was keeping it private that he’s stealing hundreds of millions of the public’s money for his ballroom. All this while gutting health care and raising costs,” Democratic Representative Gabe Amo wrote on X. “Shame. We have to stop this grift.”

The Trump administration’s plan to approve $300 billion in aid for reconstructing Iran has only become more confusing.

Vice President JD Vance all but confirmed to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Monday morning that the $300 billion was a real proposal in the Iran peace deal. Yet within hours—and after some monumental backlash from his party—Vance seemed to change his tune, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Iran would not receive a “single dime” of U.S. money.

“The agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money, that’s just not what this is,” Vance said Monday night. “What the agreement does say, Sean, is again, if the Iranians behave, and if there are sanctions relief, and if the Iranians are integrated into the world economy, we would invite other countries—not us—but other countries to invest in their country.

“That’s fine, but only if they comply with the terms of the agreement,” Vance added.

Vance did not elaborate on how the administration planned to manage or gatekeep foreign aid packages intended for Iran.

The White House and Tehran have already signed a peace deal, though the exact specifications of the agreement have not yet been revealed (and are still being hashed out). The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.

The most contentious point of the plan, however, is a reported $300 billion reconstruction fund, as well as billions more in unfrozen Iranian assets and forfeited sanctions—which were originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Donald Trump similarly tried to cast doubt on the proposal Monday evening, claiming on Truth Social that “the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!”

But not everyone in the administration is on the same page. Earlier that day, a U.S. official told reporters that the White House had “discussed the possibility of releasing frozen funds, sanctions relief, you know, a big $300 billion fund to rebuild their country, and all of these things are going to be tied to performance.”

President Trump is defending America’s tentative deal with Iran, claiming that the U.S. is not “investing any money.”

Trump told reporters at the G7 summit in France Tuesday morning that unlike with 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran, the U.S. was not transferring cash to Iran, ignoring the fact that reports of the still-unpublished deal include Iranian access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds and releasing $25 billion in Iranian assets.

“We’re not investing any money. We have the right to if we want, but we’re not investing any money. We didn’t pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars, he paid $1.7 billion from an airplane, all green cash. I watched that, I couldn’t believe it,” Trump said. “But the one that’s happening that’s of note, frankly the only thing that matters to me is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”

The JCPOA also included a commitment from Iran that it would not pursue a nuclear weapon. Plus, it included the U.S. lifting sanctions and sending Iran $1.7 billion to settle decades-old failed contracts between the two countries. In Trump’s new deal, the funding sources for the $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran are unclear, although Vice President JD Vance said Monday that they would come from the “Gulf coast coalition.”

Is that some combination of Persian Gulf countries and the U.S., or did Vance actually mean to refer to the Gulf Cooperation Council? If some of that money does come from American taxpayers, that’s not going to go over well with most of Congress, except a few of Trump’s most sycophantic supporters.