Trump Blows Up Iran Talks as He Tries to Take Over Strait of Hormuz

Trump last instituted a blockade on the strait in April, after Iran had already closed the vital passageway. The U.S. blockade wasn’t particularly successful back then, considering that Iran had the economic resources to outlast it, and ended with the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding last month.

Over the weekend, Iran targeted U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf and Jordan, while the U.S. said it had attacked military targets in Iran such as missile sites, air defenses, and coastal radar. Iran says it will not come back to the negotiating table until there is a new ceasefire, although Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went to Oman on Saturday to speak with regional mediators about the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s leader Mojtaba Khamenei called for revenge against the U.S. in an X post on Saturday following last week’s state funeral for his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes at the beginning of the war in February. It remains to be seen if and when tensions will settle down long enough for negotiations to resume.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is spending taxpayer funds worth thousands of dollars to make and hang more large banners with his face on them all over federal buildings in Washington, D.C.

Democratic Senator Adam Schiff shared newly discovered federal contracts with MeidasTouch News that show government agencies putting their own budgets toward “America First” banners, which include ones of the president’s face.

The Department of the Interior made a $39,000 contract for “America First” banners with Trump’s portrait, while the Federal Aviation Administration awarded a $114,000 contract for “Freedom 250” banners. Both contracts went to a Maryland-based graphic design agency called Grafik Industries.

Using taxpayer dollars to fund government propaganda and self-promotion by public officials isn’t allowed, Schiff says.

“The Trump administration is spending hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars to glorify and pay tribute to a sitting U.S. President and his political agenda,” Schiff said in a statement. “Not only is this a terrible waste of Americans’ hard-earned money, it is clearly against the law. Congress has long outlawed spending tax dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement and an eight-story high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies as propaganda.”

In September, Schiff issued a report showing that Trump had spent at least $56,000 on promotional banners with his face that were later hung on government buildings, including the Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Health and Human Services headquarters. This is part of a pattern of Trump wanting to put his name and face on as many things as possible in Washington, D.C. and remake the city in his own image.

No matter how much money Trump wastes on his propaganda art, it won’t change the fact that his popularity is plummeting and that federal workers in the nation’s capital hate him.

A person was shot and killed Monday morning by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Biddeford, Maine, according to reports by local media outlets and authorities.

“This morning a shooting occurred in Biddeford,” Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau wrote in a Facebook post. “A person was killed. ICE was involved. State Police and the Department of Public Safety are now on scene to gather details and would expect the FBI to investigate as well.”

Video footage circulating online appears to show ICE agents standing around the deceased in an intersection.

This is at least the eleventh fatal ICE shooting since Donald Trump returned to office and the second in less than a week, coming just days after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7.

This is a developing story.

Last spring, it was rumored that agents with the FBI were trained to redact portions of the Epstein files before the documents became public. On Sunday, agency officials admitted to the scheme.

It took independent journalist and award-winning podcaster Allison Gill a year, a Freedom of Information Act request, and a subsequent lawsuit against the government to obtain evidence that the bureau had specifically trained its investigators to scrub the Epstein files clean. On Sunday, Gill received a stunning admission from the FBI confirming that the training videos—which were never released as part of the legal mandate—do in fact exist.

Numerous federal agents from both the FBI and the Justice Department have shared their experiences of participating in the censorship effort, recounting how they would sometimes be locked in the building for 24- or 48-hour shifts to review hundreds of thousands of files, videos, and photos related to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring. One of the things agents were reportedly instructed to redact was mentions of Donald Trump’s name.

“They confided in me that there existed an unclassified share point site where a Powerpoint deck lived, and that the Powerpoint deck had training videos embedded in it, instructing them on how to find and log and mark Trump’s name and other information for redaction,” Gill said in a video report.

The bureau’s information management division was predominantly tasked with censoring the documents, despite the fact that the unit has not historically been used to scrub documents for publication. So the FBI had to create specialized training videos for the agents, instructing them how to “use an Excel spreadsheet to log Trump’s name, the page number, and the document,” reported Gill.

Even still, Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the initial release of the Epstein files. His name also appeared in an FBI tip sheet listing abuse allegations, including one in which an unknown source accuses Trump of forcing one of Epstein’s victims, presumed to be 13 or 14 years old at the time, to perform oral sex on him “approximately 35 years ago” in New Jersey.

In a Sunday talk show appearance, President Donald Trump used the death of Senator Lindsey Graham the day prior as a get-out-of-answering-questions-free card.

The weekend saw the unexpected death of the Republican senator at age 71. It also saw the United States and Iran trade fire in the Middle East, reaffirming the apparent collapse of the June memorandum of understanding between the two countries.

When CNN’s State of the Union host Jake Tapper queried Trump about the latter development, the president used the former as an excuse not to answer.

“Are we back at war, and who controls the Strait of the Hormuz?” Tapper asked.

Before he had even finished the question, the president was dodging it: “Well I don’t want to—out of respect for Lindsey, I’m not talking about that. We hit ’em very hard last night, so I don’t want to talk about it, but I will say we hit ’em very hard last night.”

The president went on to allege that Iran’s leaders had been “giving up everything” during talks on Saturday before they turned on a dime, hitting “a ship with a drone.” Such rhetoric is consistent with Trump’s past attempts to portray Iran, despite the evidence to the contrary, as desperate and on the verge of surrender.

“These people, there’s something wrong with them,” Trump said of Iran, “but I’m talking about a man who had nothing wrong with him, and that’s Lindsey Graham.”

Later in the interview, Tapper tried again to get information about the war out of Trump, asking if the Strait of Hormuz is closed as Iran has claimed. But his luck was no better this time, with the president responding, “It’s open as far as we’re concerned. Don’t talk about it. Talk about the reason that you asked me to speak.”

Come Monday morning, Iran and the U.S. were both claiming to be in control of the strait.