Trump Ignored Every Warning He Got on Iran War—and There Were a Lot

Multiple people close to President Trump advised him to moderate his approach to the war on Iran. Six months later, with 18 U.S. service members and 3,000 Iranians dead and his approval rating at an all-time low, it appears he should’ve listened.

A new report from The Wall Street Journal reveals how Trump ignored the warnings of his own administration members in the lead-up to the February attack.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned Trump in February that assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would only bring a more hardline government into power, which in turn would lead Iran to tighten their grip on the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing and crippling the global energy market.

There were other warnings too. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told Trump that an all-out campaign would result in an overexerted fighting force and a depleted weapons stockpile. Even Vice President JD Vance warned against escalation at one point.

The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to make Americans believe that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, that its military really is decimated, and that this feckless war is in their best interest.

“He will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” a spokesperson for the White House said, also claiming that Iran’s military was virtually useless. “It would be wise for Iran to reach a deal. Otherwise, they know what could happen.”

Now, as the economy remains in freefall, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and as Trump turns to a flimsy “economic D-Day” solution, it is clear that the president should have heeded the advice he was given. The fact that he’s pivoting back to sanctions now signals what has been obvious for months—that his strongman military approach was a failure.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump was privately very upset and even confused as to why his all out bombing assault on Iran didn’t yield a surrender, displaying an alarming lack of foreign policy tact, even for him.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” Nuclear Threat Initiative deputy vice president Eric Brewer told The Wall Street Journal. “You can draw a straight line from the fact that the war was launched without any clear political objective to the mishandled diplomacy in trying to end it.”

President Trump is taking out his frustrations on Canada by threatening to rename Lake Ontario.

“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted early Tuesday morning on Truth Social.

Trump was responding to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who responded to Trump’s tariff threat against cars and trucks produced in Canada Monday by saying that the U.S. president “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 said in a radio interview.

Trump also denied reports that Canada pulled out of trade negotiations over the weekend over crazy last-minute demands from Trump administration officials such as changing Quebec’s French-language protections.

“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing. This lie was made up by a weak and ineffective Prime Minister in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec. I love French Canadians! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted less than 45 minutes after his threat to rename Lake Ontario.

Trump’s feud with Canada could have far-reaching economic effects. Canadian officials will announce their own retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. on Tuesday. These could target any number of goods and services that Canada provides to its southern neighbor, including electricity, oil and gas, uranium, aluminum, and rare earth materials.

The price of gas and other goods in the U.S. is already high thanks to the Iran war and Trump’s mismanagement of the economy. A trade war with Canada will only hurt the American economy further and punish consumers just in time for November’s midterm elections.

This story has been updated.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the Supreme Court’s Monday shadow-docket decision to greenlight Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting ahead of this year’s midterm elections. While the decision does not necessarily mean mail-in voting will be overhauled, it nevertheless removes a block that the judiciary had placed in the administration’s way.

In an unsigned order Monday, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court stay on an executive order requiring the U.S. Postal Service to bar any person not included on a massive federal voter list from receiving a mail-in or absentee ballot.

All three of the high court’s liberal justices dissented from the unsigned order.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” wrote Jackson. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

After the executive order was signed in March, Democratic officials in 23 states and the District of Columbia sued to block the order. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani blocked the plan in Massachusetts, and later issued a nationwide injunction. Last month, Trump’s Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue, calling the challenge “premature” and “hypothetical” because the order had not been implemented by the Department of Homeland Security or the U.S. Postal Service.

It’s unclear how this order might be implemented in the time that remains between now and the fast-approaching midterm elections. The high court’s decision is also far from the final judicial challenge the administration faces in its efforts to juke the upcoming elections. Today’s ruling left open the possibility for future legal challenges.

Trump’s order has been described by Democratic leaders as a “desperate, illegal power grab” and “laughably unconstitutional.”

Despite the obvious chaos Trump’s order would cause, the U.S. Postal Service has moved ahead with issuing new requirements for mail-in ballots. If implemented, Trump’s executive order could potentially disenfranchise thousands of Americans who vote by mail ahead of the high-stakes midterm elections.

Darline Graham’s latest bid to solidify Donald Trump’s support involves a fraught empty gesture.

The 62-year-old younger sister and current occupant of the late Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat dodged questions on Monday as to whether she would have certified the results of the 2020 presidential election, as her brother had six years prior.

“Senator, you just mentioned that you agree with your brother on everything except for one matter, that being illegal immigration; you’d go farther than him on that,” said MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell during a press conference. “That being said, I’m curious, do you agree with him about the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was certified the winner of that election, was lawfully elected, and that you would’ve voted to certify the election, as your brother did?”

Graham responded that she believed that the “election system is broken,” attempting to redirect the question toward her support for the White House’s SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that has divided Congress for most of the year.

“You won’t commit to having certified the results of the 2020 election?” Schnell pressed in a follow-up question.

Graham refused to elaborate.

Trump has fervently championed Graham’s candidacy, despite the fact that she brings zero legislative experience to the job. She also seems to have little awareness of current events and pressing matters: Last week, Graham flopped on a softball debate question regarding Taiwan, shrugging that “national security is not my thing.” Nevertheless, her actual policy positions may not matter at all with the local electorate, depending on voters’ attitudes toward the president.

“If a voter’s decision is all about Trump, then they don’t care what she knows about foreign policy or anything else,” Scott Huffmon, a professor of political science at Winthrop University, told Newsweek Monday. “The question is will they ‘believe in’ this endorsement and be as, or more, motivated as the people who showed up at county meetings over the years to censure Lindsey Graham.”

Graham’s popularity—as well as Trump’s—will be put to the test Tuesday, when South Carolina Republicans head to the polls to officially decide whether she or five-term Representative Ralph Norman will replace the deceased lawmaker on the general election ballot.

For years, election denialism was one of the minimal litmus tests for MAGA allegiance, requiring wannabe Trumpians to publicly question the security of America’s democracy in order to invite the president’s political favor. But that may be changing: In recent months, Trump’s magic touch hasn’t been quite so effective. So far, 10 of Trump’s candidates have crumbled in this primary cycle—as many as lost in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined.

President Donald Trump’s administration has come up with a new scheme that will  gut due process for asylum applicants. 

Officers at the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, or FDNS, have been reassigned to two other immigration projects, undermining training for the agency’s asylum program, The Guardian reported Monday. 

Immigration officers have been reassigned to two supposedly “high-priority” initiatives: screening South African refugees and “unlawful” voters, according to internal correspondence obtained by the publication. As a result, the FDNS will not be able to assign personnel to train the asylum officers of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS.

FDNS’s main functions are to investigate immigration-related fraud, establish guidance for vetting and adjudicating asylum cases, and implement screening policies and procedures. 

These new initiatives are clearly inspired by two Trump administration priorities that can best be described as seeking to fix something entirely nonexistent: the first, cracking down on phantasmal voter fraud; the second, supporting the immigration of Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch colonizers in South Africa, who are fleeing an equally imaginary white genocide.

Any disruption in training asylum officers will further slow down the processing of asylum cases—which have already come to a screeching halt under the Trump administration. 

Last month, the USCIS proposed a new rule that would refer asylum applicants for deportation without offering them an interview or hearing. The move is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to transform the agency into yet another arm of the president’s mass deportation machine.