Trump Wants to Forget About the Disastrous Iran War

Donald Trump no longer seems concerned about brokering a deal with Iran after the midterms.

In a layered Truth Social post Thursday, the president declared that “we don’t need a deal with Iran.”

“Those days have long since passed,” Trump continued. “We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

Hours earlier, Trump declared victory against Iran during a Veteran’s Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, even though he acknowledged the war is not yet over.

“Under this administration, and it was about time, somebody fought back,” Trump said. “All of us fought back. We fought back. And we seriously fought back. And we won. Just a question of when we want to end it.”

“We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93 percent victory,” he added. “It’s going to be total. It’ll take them 25 years to rebuild back what we have destroyed, and hopefully we won’t have to destroy any more of that country.”

For weeks, Trump teased a full-scale bombardment of Iran after the midterm elections. That has not yet happened. Instead, the Pentagon launched Task Force Iron Gate to choke off the country’s trade routes and limit its advanced weapons shipments, according to Reuters.

But Iran has not backed down. Instead, Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei escalated the country’s threats on Wednesday, pledging that Tehran would also attack European military bases if they were used by American forces for renewed warfaring purposes.

“If American aircraft take off from an American military base, even one located in a European country or some other distant region, to bomb Iran, we will strike those bases as well,” Rezaei told Lebanese broadcaster Al Mayadeen TV.

In another portion of the interview, Rezai vaguely warned that Iran might also attack more distant U.S. military installations, as well as “certain islands that they assume are beyond the reach of our missiles.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears to be trying to cover its tracks after the agency was sued on Tuesday by a woman it violently arrested and detained. 

HuffPost reports that ICE deleted at least two posts from its X account defending the arrest of Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, who was heading to a medical appointment in January when agents smashed her car window and dragged her from the vehicle. Rahman sued the agency, accusing agents of false arrest and imprisonment, negligent supervision, negligence, assault, and battery.

The first deleted post, from February, included a video of the incident. ICE captioned the video: “Unfortunately, we have the receipts. As shown in our video, Aliya Rahman clearly had enough room to move herself and her vehicle out of the way. Officers even walked away from the vehicle, thinking that she was going to leave the scene. Instead, she remained at the location, continued to impede our officers, and found out the hard way.”  

The second deleted post criticized Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren, who brought up Rahman’s violent arrest at a congressional hearing in March with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. 

“Rep. Lofgren is pushing a lie that’s already been debunked,” the post read. “As shown in our video, anti-ICE agitator Aliya Rahman clearly had enough room to move herself and her vehicle out of the way. Officers even walked away from her vehicle, thinking she was going to leave the scene. Instead, she remained at the location, continued to impede our officers, and found out the hard way.”

The agency didn’t respond to HuffPost’s questions as to why it deleted the posts. Federal agencies are required to preserve all records by law, including social media posts. At least one other post mentioning Rahman is still available on ICE’s X profile. 

“Agencies cannot delete records from a social media platform or from a recordkeeping system without a disposition provided by a NARA-approved records schedule,” the National Archives and Records Administration told government agency leaders in a November 2022 memo.  

A Homeland Security spokesperson told HuffPost, “We are aware of the lawsuit and look forward to vigorously defending ourselves in court.” 

Is Elon Musk messing with Ukraine’s Starlink access again?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy claimed Thursday that the country’s Starshield, the military-grade version of Starlink communication systems, had once again experienced “significant disruptions” over Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine for the past “several days.”

“The Ukrainian military have already investigated the circumstances, and these are not random errors but systematic speed restrictions,” Zelenskiy wrote in a statement on X.

News of these disruptions came as U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow Thursday morning to continue peace deal negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Last month, SpaceX also interrupted the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals, blinding the Ukrainian government. That disruption came just days after President Donald Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries in the wake of the U.S. lifting sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.

Initially, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed that it was Trump’s idea, while the president played dumb. The order to slow the service reportedly came directly from the White House, and later reporting suggested that Musk approached Trump about disrupting his own military communications service in Ukraine.

In a separate post on X Thursday, Zelenskiy said that the Starshield disruptions directly affected Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian jet-powered drones with drones of their own. “This means more Russian strikes get through, and more of our people are killed by Russia,” he wrote.

“We are trying to get the details from the American side, but so far, we know very little,” he wrote. “If someone in America is making decisions that basically treat Ukrainian territory as if it is not Ukrainian, then this tells us where things are going.”

Some Republican lawmakers are clearly fed up with their “stupid” GOP colleagues who refuse to learn from the party’s sweeping losses in the midterm elections.

Following total disaster in the midterm elections, Republican lawmakers have responded by refusing to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose leadership of the unpopular Iran war contributed greatly to Republican losses, and choosing Representative Jim Jordan, a MAGA extremist, to serve as the new House minority leader.

Republican Senator John Kennedy slammed anyone who tried to downplay the disastrous midterm during an appearance on Fox News’s Hannity Thursday.

“This was not a normal midterm election loss. If you think that, congratulations, you’re stupid,” Kennedy said. (Of course, host Sean Hannity was among the figures who had attempted to minimize the Republicans’ midterm massacre.)

Rather than simply stay home, Kennedy claimed that voters had actively rejected the MAGA agenda. “They voted for Democrats, and we’ve gotta get Toby and Edith back,” he said.

Earlier on the Senate floor, Kennedy said Republicans were basically urinating on themselves.

“A smart man washes his hands after he urinates. A wise man doesn’t urinate on his hands. We need to stop urinating on our hands.... We Republicans in the Senate need to stop thinking we’re so smart,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy wasn’t the only Republican who appeared frustrated with the response from his party.

Republican Representative David Joyce spoke to CNN’s Manu Raju Wednesday, about Republicans who’d signaled their intention to double down on the MAGA agenda.

“They can’t double down on stupid,” Joyce said.

“What happened to us was a message, clear and very loud, that people don’t like the way we’re been moving in the wrong direction, and you can’t lie to people about the things that they feel,” he said. “They feel it at the pump. They feel it at the grocery store. They feel it in their kids’ education, in the potential for losing their jobs to AI. And we haven’t done anything to address those.”

Republicans are turning on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after he stalled a crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia chips to China. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been at the center of the news cycle after it was revealed he had an affair with a Chinese spy.

Politico reports that Republican leaders are criticizing Lutnick for not taking action against Megaspeed, the Singapore-based firm with ties to the Chinese government whose executive was in a relationship with Huang. Several Republicans say they want Lutnick and his deputies to answer their questions, possibly in sworn testimony.

“The obvious question is why did [Lutnick] choose to sell advanced chips?” Republican Senator John Kennedy told Politico Wednesday. “Secretary Lutnick needs to answer that in front of God and country. If I were he, I’d call a press conference this afternoon and explain what happened and why he agreed to sell them chips, and I would stop doing it.”

Republican Representative Bill Huizenga called on Lutnick to testify before Congress, saying, “I don’t think he’s been very responsive.” He added that the Bureau of Industry and Security, an agency in the Commerce Department that is responsible for blacklisting overseas companies from using American technology, has “been less responsive than they should be.”

Lutnick is also receiving pressure from elsewhere in the Trump administration. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly criticized him in a White House meeting last week for not taking earlier action on Megaspeed.

“I’d say we want to get to the bottom of the matter and to really have transparency on this,” said Republican Representative John Moolenar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Moolenar told Politico that he wants Lutnick and others in the administration to brief Congress on the Chinese government’s influence on Nvidia, and how that in turn influenced U.S. security policy.