Bessent Flails as Trump’s Phony “Economic D-Day” on Iran Is Exposed

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent struggled to explain how the Trump administration’s vague, toothless threat of more sanctions against Iran—which the president is calling an “economic D-Day”—was anything like the actual D-Day. 

Bessent held a Monday afternoon press conference to make himself known. 

“Beginning today … Treasury and other agencies will tighten the noose and block every potential source of revenue that funds the IRGC and the evil Iranian regime. We are enforcing a zero leakage approach; there will be no minimal breathing space for the regime to rebuild its capacity to inflict terror against America and the world,” he said.  

The secondary sanctions, which target countries that do trade with Iran, are aimed at digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. 

Yet Bessent wavered when asked about the details behind his aggressive claims, acknowledging that the “economic D-Day” was more of a warning than anything else.

When asked twice if his sanctions would target China or oft-mentioned Chinese banks accused of facilitating transactions for Iran, he had no direct answer, saying that the sanction recipients “know who they are.” 

He avoided specifics entirely for the rest of the questioning period. 

“You said the president is calling world leaders with specific asks, and that there is a defined timeline,” a reporter from CBS asked. “Who is he calling, and what are the asks?”

“We’re not gonna name names. We’ve already seen some results.… As you all know, the president is quite persuasive, and we are following his calls up with calls from the State Department and from the U.S. Treasury … telling the leaders, and the countries, and the entities exactly what we expect. And the timelines,” he equivocated. “And I would expect that very quickly, if they do not respond, then you will see the ramifications of their actions.”

“You described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn’t a threat of an invasion, and the U.S. didn’t give a timeline to Germany,” another reporter followed up. “So why not impose the sanctions today?”

“We are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? We believe that it is important to level set and give people a cure period, but they should know that that will move very quickly and that we are serious,” Bessent said, although it’s unclear how he plans on demonstrating that seriousness without any clear timeline for the sanctions. 

“Secondary sanctions are a very powerful tool.… The reason we are able to use secondary sanctions is because we do not take their use lightly,” he concluded. “So we believe that a warning shot and a level set of expectations is appropriate, and if people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect, and they should expect, that they will leave the dollar system.” 

It seems like the Trump administration rolled out Bessent for tough talk and unspecified threats because they are running out of options. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for nearly 200 days, and Iran has already dealt with U.S. sanctions for 47 years. Why would this empty show of economic force change anything? 

Donald Trump’s administration has a new plan to turn the U.S. immigration system into a moneymaking scheme, ensuring that legal pathways to citizenship are out of reach for low-income immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule Monday that would establish a $103,265 fee for immigrants petitioning for a H-1B worker visa.

The proposed fee would be applied to all H-1B visa petitioners, including those already in the United States, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

“This fee would serve as a dedicated revenue mechanism to help recover a portion of the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system,” according to a federal notice.

The money raised from the fee would be directed to DHS, the Department of Labor, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice. Clearly, the rule is designed as a deterrent as the fee is prohibitively expensive for all but the most affluent.

In June, a federal judge blocked Trump’s original $100,000 H-1B visa fee for employers, finding that the fee was an illegal tax on businesses. It’s not clear why this new proposal wouldn’t be subject to a similar adjudication, as only Congress has the authority to impose taxes—not the president.

Trump has continued to undermine America’s ability to attract and retain talent from other countries. The administration’s racist replacement theories are accomplishing little other than to make our nation poorer and sicker. Meanwhile, one study estimates that H-1B visa holders who arrived between 1990 and 2020 were responsible for 30 percent to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period—as well as spurring wage growth for native workers.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has become so toxic that even embattled Republicans are shying away from its donations.

The pro-Israel lobbying group has spent millions on an ad campaign to assist Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, in a contentious midterm race against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. But Rogers and his team are wavering on the proposed ad expenditure, concerned that any ties to the organization might hurt rather than help him come November, The New York Times reported Monday.

Rogers reportedly brought up his reservations during a meeting last week with the AIPAC board chair, Michael Tuchin. Rogers did not explicitly say that he did not want AIPAC involved in his race, but encouraged the United Democracy Project, the organization’s super PAC, to ease up on its media plan and “give more serious thought to whether the organization is the best messenger” against El-Sayed, according to a source that spoke with the Times.

Bobby Schostak, Rogers’s adviser and fundraising consultant, said in a statement that their campaign welcomes support from AIPAC’s community.

“We have support from the Jewish and pro-Israel community,” he told the Times. “We want that support and will continue to welcome and are proud to have any and all support from the pro-Israel community and AIPAC community.”

Rogers hasn’t completely resisted the organization’s call: On Sunday, the election denier attended three AIPAC-hosted fundraising events in Los Angeles, and has plans to attend another on Monday.

El-Sayed has been a vocal critic of Israel since he entered the race. The progressive firebrand has described the ethnostate’s war against Gaza as a genocide, referred to its government as “evil,” and has argued against providing U.S. military aid to Israel.

AIPAC spent tens of millions of dollars—approximately $32 million via the United Democracy Project—in an unsuccessful bid to defeat El-Sayed in the state’s primary, backing his rival, Haley Stevens. Now, in an extraordinary political shift, the organization is gearing to spend millions more on Republicans rather than Democrats in a hail-mary effort to keep the 41-year-old, Oxford-educated doctor out of Washington.

“Our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr. El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November,” Deryn Sousa, a spokeswoman for AIPAC, told the Times in a statement earlier this month.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford doesn’t care about President Trump’s threat to increase tariffs on cars and trucks produced in Canada.

On Truth Social Monday morning, Trump wrote that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years. Their ridiculously high tariffs on our Farmers and farm products has made life impossible for these great American Patriots, and has long created a 60 Billion Dollar Deficit between our two Countries. Not sustainable, and NOT ANYMORE!

“On January First, 2027, Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%. Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump continued.

In response, Ford told an Ottawa radio show, “Well, he can kiss my ass as far as I’m concerned. We’re going to go at him full steam, and we buy 400 percent more cars than anyone in the world.”

Ford pointed out that Canada exports oil and gas to the U.S. and supplies some states with electricity, and suggested that “maybe what we should be doing is charging him triple on the oil, triple on the potash, on the uranium, on our metals, and our rare earth metals.”

The Canadian politician, a member of the country’s right-wing Conservative Party, invoked former President Ronald Reagan in his rejoinder to Trump.

“We need to throw everything in the kitchen sink at him. He’s arrogant, he’s cocky, and you know, as Ronald Reagan said, ‘If you come to a draw with a bully, what stops that bully from coming after you the next day and the next day? And that’s all Donald Trump is, is a bully. Well, he’s going to have a rude awakening,” Ford said. He also told the Associated Press that Reagan would be “throwing up” from a picture of him Trump keeps in the Oval Office.

“He’d be throwing up on [Trump] from the picture if he knew what was going on, spinning around in his grave right now,” Ford said. “He should maybe take that picture off the wall and move it somewhere else. Because right now, Ronald Reagan would be disgusted with President Trump.”

Ford has invoked Reagan before in taking shots at Trump, using an audio clip from Reagan in October last year in a TV ad where the former president said tariffs only serve to “hurt every American.” The ad enraged Trump enough to end trade talks with Canada at the time.

Over the weekend, Canada halted tariff negotiations with the U.S. over last-minute demands from Trump such as changing Quebec’s French-language protections and the calculation of tariff payments on Canadian cars, among other details. Ford’s comments, coupled with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the Canadian people Monday, suggest that the country is not going to back down in this new trade war launched by Trump.

National Guard members are speaking out about their feelings of humiliation and frustration being involved in Donald Trump’s yearlong federal takeover of Washington D.C.

National Public Radio spoke with three National Guard members who were deployed for many months as part of the so-called “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force”—and surprise, surprise, they hated it.

“I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way,” one guard member told NPR.

“I don’t want to think about the National Guard. I don’t want to necessarily discuss my affiliation with the National Guard. I don’t want to fulfill my normal National Guard duties just because of the abuses of the National Guard in this D.C. mission,” the guard member added.

After being summoned to address a so-called “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital, the National Guard was quickly looped in on trash pickup and other landscaping duties on the National Mall. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that all three National Guard members expressed skepticism about the reason they were deployed.

“Now, with it being a year, it’s hard to feel like that justification holds any water,” said another guard member. “It feels like the guard is being exploited in a sense.”

One of the guard members criticized Trump’s federal takeover as feeling like a “very authoritarian move.”

Another one of the guardsmen said that their deployment felt like a political stunt, and pointed to the organization’s insertion in Trump’s false narratives about the city. Last month, the National Guard was ordered to patrol the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after the president falsely claimed that it had been targeted by vandals.

“I hope that there will be some accounting someday—probably after President Trump is gone—about why we were there, and was it worth it? But none of that is gonna happen right now,” that member said.

The Trump administration has continued to lie about lowering the crime rates in the District of Columbia. Last month, the White House claimed that Washington D.C. had seen one of the steepest homicide drops of any city nationwide in the first six months of the year—but multiple reports have found that’s not true at all.

Last month, the Center for American Progress found that Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to American cities has cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion and failed to reduce the rate of violent crime. The Trump administration has responded by suing the organization for defamation.