Mike Johnson Accidentally Wrecks Trump’s Claim About Strait of Hormuz

House Speaker Mike Johnson just shattered President Donald Trump’s lies about reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

At a rally in North Carolina Wednesday night, Trump insisted—as his administration has claimed for weeks—that the Strait of Hormuz was open. But hundreds of miles away on Capitol Hill, Johnson revealed that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Now, that ongoing conflict obviously has had an effect on gas prices, for example, because the Strait of Hormuz is not completely open safely for commerce yet, and the Red Sea is affected as well,” Johnson said at a press conference.

“Of course gas prices are too high,” he continued. “When we get that thing resolved in the Strait of Hormuz, that will have a direct effect on that, and it will help to bring down grocery costs.”

The speaker claimed that Republican lawmakers were “working around the clock” to resolve the situation by speaking to people in their districts “with authenticity and frankness.” In reality, House Republicans took a five-week vacation and then returned to work for just seven days before adjourning Wednesday until after the midterms.

The Trump administration has spent weeks claiming that the flow of ships and gasoline through the Strait of Hormuz has resumed—but it’s still far less than the prewar average. Even more concerningly, a consistent gap has emerged between the government’s claims about the flow of energy and the quantities tracked by industry firms.

Meanwhile, crude oil prices pushed above $100 per barrel Wednesday, causing diesel prices to surge to more than $6 per gallon at stations around the country. Trump has continued to claim that prices won’t fall until “right after” the midterm elections—when the White House is reportedly plotting to escalate military action against Iran.

An independent group tapped by the United Nations’ top human rights body reported Thursday that it found “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran.

The cited atrocity was a pair of Tomahawk missile strikes on the “clearly identifiable” Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab—a city in the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan—and a sports complex in Lamerd that occurred in February. The two attacks killed 178 civilians, most of them children.

The findings were documented in a report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran and submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

At the time of the strikes, U.S. military officials denied that they were behind the attack. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that the U.S. “never” targets civilians during foreign conflicts. Early reports indicated that outdated Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base.

The fact-finding mission found that the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school site “was a military objective.” It also declared that the U.S. had acted wilfully and recklessly, and had failed to do basic due diligence such as updating its databases or examining publicly available data that would have revealed the site was a school.

“The Mission considers that the U.S.’s failure to update information in relation to the school in its targeting databases and to verify that the building was a military objective before launching the attack went beyond mere negligence,” the report reads. “Rather, the U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”

The group confirmed that the U.S. was behind the attacks by analyzing the damage the strikes inflicted on the surrounding area as well as to the victims’ bodies. The group said the distinctive pock-marking left behind by a wide spray of tungsten bullets suggested that the weapon of choice was Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike missiles, also identified as “PRsM.” The U.S., the independent body concluded, was the only nation in the conflict that possessed such weapons.

President Donald Trump already has plans to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

One day after a federal judge ordered Trump to finally give up on plastering his name on the Kennedy Center, and the president’s handpicked board of trustees voted to close the center, Trump was spotted reviewing plans to destroy the nation’s prestigious national theater.

AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski captured a photograph through the window of Air Force One Wednesday night in which Trump can be seen looking at a large posterboard emblazoned with the words “KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLISH.”

Speaking to reporters on the tarmac earlier that evening, Trump made it clear that he couldn’t be bothered to renovate a former president’s memorial because he hadn’t been allowed to plaster his name on it.

“I’d like to be able to save it, but it’s going to take a lot of subsidy into the future and for us as an administration to want to do that, I think the Trump administration should be recognized,” Trump said.

In a court filing last month, prosecutors suggested that the proposed $250 million renovation project was necessary for the institution’s survival. If the building wasn’t able to be renovated, they suggested constructing a “large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River.”

Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, a Kennedy Center trustee and the plaintiff in the court battle to block the center’s renaming, requested an emergency hearing to challenge the sudden closure, calling it “unexplained and unlawful.”

But Trump may not be waiting for the hearing. A legal observer said in court filings Wednesday night that she had seen a “forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.”

President Donald Trump told a North Carolina audience that if Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley doesn’t win in November, he would withhold FEMA funds. But don’t worry, he’s only joking!

“We spent more than $2 billion, FEMA funding, and you know you’re waiting for some additional money to take care of some of the back, and I’m gonna get that to you, Michael. Now, if Michael loses, I’m not sending it, OK. No, I’m only kidding, you’re getting it. You’re going to get it, Michael, so. He’s been bugging me, he’s been bugging me,” Trump said to a packed rally in Gastonia, Whatley’s hometown Wednesday.

Trump was in North Carolina to stump for Whatley and other Republicans in the state, which is still recovering from the aftereffects of Hurricane Helene two years ago. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in the state since 2008, but Democrat Roy Cooper is ahead in all of the state’s major polls, making Trump’s presence in North Carolina almost a requirement for the state GOP.

How much will a bad joke help, though? The Trump administration has been known to use federal funding to punish states that vote against him enough times that he has been challenged in court over it. While North Carolina hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 2008, Trump and Republicans are polling historically underwater. Not only could they lose this Senate seat, but they could set the stage for an even bigger loss in two years.

Two nominees on course to help lead America’s public health policy have distanced themselves from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and his anti-vaccine positions.

Dr. Nicole Saphier and HHS counselor Chris Klomp are on track to become the country’s next surgeon general and deputy HHS secretary, respectively. As such, both would work underneath Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Yet neither hesitated to rebuke the health secretary’s unscientific preachings during Senate confirmation hearings this week.

In one exchange with Republican senator (and former physician and medical educator) Bill Cassidy, Saphier explained that not only does she “not believe the [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine to be lethal” but also that she had “not seen reputable evidence that would suggest vaccines cause autism.”

“I believe the MMR vaccine is our greatest tool for combating measles,” elaborated Saphier, a radiologist and former Fox News contributor. 

“That’s music,” Cassidy sighed.

“I do not believe childhood vaccines cause autism,” Saphier added.

Klomp similarly dismissed Kennedy’s hokum Tuesday, firmly endorsing the measles vaccine while describing the fight against the current measles outbreak as America’s chief public health priority.

“Unquestionably, the MMR vaccine is the single most effective public health tool that we have against measles,” Klomp told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden.

The conspiratorial rhetoric of the anti-vax movement has had disastrous effects on U.S. inoculation rates, spurring a regional measles health crisis that has killed four  people this year, a high not seen since 1992. Another 3,200 people have been infected, exceeding the tally for 2025 by hundreds of cases.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, vaccination coverage for U.S. kindergartners fell by nearly 3 percent—from 95.2 percent to 92.4 percent—between the 2025–2026 school year and the 2019–2020 school year. The dip is more significant than it seems at face value: The lowered figures place the age groups below the threshold for herd immunity that would protect even unvaccinated members of a community (95 percent.)

Democratic officials have called for Kennedy to be removed from his post since letters emerged unequivocally tying his 2019 anti-vax propaganda trip to Samoa to a lethal measles outbreak that occurred on the island later that year.

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey said in a statement that Kennedy “cannot be trusted to run HHS for even one more day,” while Hawaii Governor Josh Green—who personally witnessed the Samoan outbreak—said Kennedy needed to immediately resign “for the safety and health of our country.”

Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks told CNN that America’s current measles outbreak could be “tied directly to the horrific leadership of Secretary Kennedy.”