Tag: donald trump

Trump “Close” To Ordering “Massive Attack Greater Than Anything Before” On Iran

New Iraq PM Tries Hand at Mediation

After being at the White House just last week, Iraq’s new “Washington approved” prime minister is apparently now the new shuttle diplomacy guy, after Qatari and Pakistani peace efforts on Iran have come to naught. 

The NY Times is reporting Thursday afternoon that “Iraq’s prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, is in Tehran carrying a proposal for a cease-fire between Iran and the United States, according to Iranian and Iraqi officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about matters of national security.”

But the messaging apparently went the other way to, from Tehran to Washington, per more from the Times:

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told local news media that the Iraqi leader had shared with Iranian officials his “insights and impressions” from his recent meeting with Trump. Araghchi added that Tehran and Washington don’t have a problem when it comes to finding mediators, “the problem is America’s attitude.”

At the moment, Trump is threatening new, massive attacks on Iran, which could come tonight or at any time, with the whole region on edge and the State Department telling Americans to urgently find flights out of the Middle East.

Trump “Close” To Bigger Strikes Than Ever Before: Interview

President Trump has newly been cited in Axios as saying he’s seriously considering restarting major combat operations in Iran. He’s previewing strikes that would be bigger than anything before, including in the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, when dozens of Iranian government and military leaders were killed, including the Ayatollah. There’s also chatter that Israel could rejoin the attacks this time, after Israeli jets have been absent in the past twelve days of renewed bombing raids.

However, Axios stipulated that Trump has yet to make a final decision. Mideast regional Al Hadath and Israel’s Channel 12 are separately reporting that US officials have told regional allies to “be prepared” for such a new major assault on Iran.

Axios writes, “In a brief interview, Trump acknowledged that such a decision would have consequences and stressed he hasn’t made a determination yet.” This as Brent Crude has climbed past $100 per barrel on Thursday, and as the prospect of all-out war remains unpopular among American voters, especially with months to go ahead of the midterms.

“I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” the president said. And more via the Axios interview:

  • Trump said Israel “would join in two minutes if I ask them to,” but added that “we don’t need anybody” to launch a new operation against Iran.
  • He also said there would be “consequences” for Israel joining the strikes, hinting at Iranian retaliation against Israel.
  • Trump said the Iranians “want to negotiate” but are not ready to make a deal at the moment.
  • “They haven’t received enough pain yet,” he said.
  • Two regional sources with knowledge of mediation efforts said Iranian leadership hasn’t accepted the latest proposal put forward.
  • “We are trying, but the Iranians are not being helpful,” one of them said.

The Houthis have meanwhile been ratcheting their involvement, apparently having been called upon by Tehran to help it keep leverage over key oil transit chokepoints. All the while, there have been widespread reports of the Pentagon surging large aircraft, especially refueling tankers, from Europe to the CENTCOM area.

Houthis Threaten Saudi Aramco

After the Iranian-aligned Houthis confirmed they struck two Saudi oil tankers as part of a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, as a second chokepoint on global oil supplies opens alongside the Strait of Hormuz, on Thursday the Shia militant group is now openly threatening Aramco facilities inside the kingdom… or at least some unnamed officials are telling regional media.

The Houthis have characterized their campaign as “a blockade for a blockade,” saying it is intended to pressure Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have already been blockading Houthis controlled-ports in Yemen for years, which hearkens back to a Gulf vs. Houthi chiefly aerial war that opened in 2015.

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US Lays Groundwork For Approving Offshore Nuclear Power Projects

The U.S. federal government has outlined a preliminary framework to oversee the approval of offshore nuclear power projects, advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda to safely unleash domestic energy production and reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy.

“While no commercial deployment on the Outer Continental Shelf is planned or approved at this time, it could greatly strengthen America’s energy security in the future,” Matt Giacona, acting director of the Interior Department’s Marine Minerals Administration, said in announcing the initiative on July 22.

The Marine Minerals Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) released an agreement on Wednesday that lays the groundwork for a more “detailed cooperative framework” outlining jurisdictional oversight for development of offshore nuclear power projects in “a safe and environmentally responsible way.”

The memorandum of understanding between the Marine Minerals Administration (MMA), which oversees energy projects in federal waters of the outer continental shelf, and the federal government’s independent civilian nuclear regulator will “foster cooperation” and “allow shared technical expertise to ensure reviews are efficient and transparent,” the NRC said in a statement.

Director of the NRC’s Office of Advanced Reactors Jeremy Bowen said the agreement “creates a clear framework for how our agencies will work together and ensures our processes remain efficient, transparent, and technically robust.”

“The agreement will also allow MMA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to responsibly respond to industry requests, supporting novel offshore energy production,” the MMA added.

The MMA also oversees offshore development such as seabed mining and space launch infrastructure.

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Wait, I Thought We Won the War Already?

The Iran war was originally intended to be short. Due to the fast-paced news cycle, this fact has been forgotten by many. On February 28, 2026, when the U.S. and Israel officially launched their military campaign, the administration was expecting this war to last only weeks, and for the Iranian regime to fall rather quickly. President Trump told The New York Times that he intended for strikes on Iran to continue for “four to five weeks.”

That was on March 1, 2026. It is now July.

The sporadic timeline shifts have not deterred the administration’s attempts to portray the campaign as a massive success. We have heard dozens of times now from Donald Trump that we have won the war, and that it will be wrapping up shortly.

However, the words of Donald Trump don’t comport with the military realities.

All pain, no gain

If we look back at the stated objectives set by the administration for what they sought to achieve from this war, none of them have come to fruition.

The Iranian’s stockpile of missiles and drones have not been meaningfully diminished.

The Iranian’s enriched uranium stockpile has not been destroyed or removed from the country.

The IRGC has not been cut off from their network of proxies across the Middle East. We have seen this in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has managed to deal some significant blows to the IDF in the south of the country. The Iranians are also considering activating the Houthis in Yemen to cut off the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, should U.S. strikes on Iranian infrastructure continue.

Regime change has also not occurred. The rhetoric coming from the White House at the beginning of this conflict described their intent to overthrow the IRGC and make room for “the people” to rise up and implement liberal democracy in its place.

Not only did this not happen, but by all accounts, this war has had the opposite effect. At the funeral of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the streets of Tehran were flooded with Iranian citizens pledging to defend their nation and avenge the death of their leader. We saw a “rally around the flag” effect, the predictable result of bombing major cities and killing government and religious leaders in foreign lands.

If the goal was to inspire an embrace of Americanism within Iran, this war has done the opposite.

Perhaps launching a war of aggression against a population and killing their religious leader isn’t the most effective way to make them embrace your influence over their society. Just a thought.

The biggest U.S. blunder has been seen in the Strait of Hormuz, where a waterway previously open to international transit has been shut down by the IRGC, putting a massive strain on the global energy market. By using missiles and drones to close the Strait, Iran has gained a major piece of leverage. They have the ability to hold 20% of the world’s energy supply hostage, inflicting tangible financial pain on U.S. consumers at the gas pump. This will also likely cause domestic political pain for Donald Trump and the Republican Party in this year’s midterm elections.

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Long-hidden UFO information at center of Trump push to free former officials

President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to waive prior nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) for former government employees and contractors cooperating with unidentified anomalous phenomena investigations, Fox News Digital has learned.

“President Trump recently directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to allow former government employees or contractors, that have relevant information about the disclosure of UAP, to come forward to meet with designated government representatives — AARO or the President’s UAP taskforce, ‘PURSUE’ — and have their prior NDAs abrogated,” a senior administration official said, with AARO referring to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon office established to investigate UFOs and other unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

Another senior administration official emphasized the move was not a “declassification directive” and only allowed employees to come forward through government channels.

Officials say years of congressional inquiries, whistleblower allegations and newly declassified records have raised questions about whether additional witnesses have remained silent because they believed prior nondisclosure agreements prevented them from cooperating with government investigations.

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State Department blames one country for communism infecting U.S.

President Donald Trump has commented several times about the possibility of the United States taking action that would involve a takeover of Cuba.

Now the State Department has released a report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” that offers a foundation for such action.

It explains it’s because Cuba’s leftist ideologies and impulses have been behind many of the extremism agendas invading America right now.

Forbes said the report makes “inflammatory” claims, accusing Cuba of “fostering an anti-American network of left-wing activism in the U.S.,” including the Democrat party’s latest flame, the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as Black Lives Matter and more.

The report reviews tensions between Cuba and the U.S. from the Cold War on, and looks at the island nation’s “sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements.”

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CMS Stopped Medicare Payments to California, and This Is How Gavin Newsom Responded

Yesterday, the Trump administration announced it was pausing more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to Minnesota and California because of the suspected rampant fraud and noncompliance in both states. In a press conference with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) head Dr. Oz and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, it was announced that California will not receive $867 million until it can prove Medicaid and Medicare payments are legitimate.

Dr. Oz pointed out that California spending on in-home care went up 24 percent in the last two years, double the country’s average. “California increased spending at twice the rate of the average of the rest of the entire nation,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense.” Doubly so when you consider that California has had a net population loss over the last several years.

We all knew Gov. Gavin Newsom would respond to this pausing of payments, and he tried to blame President Trump for it. But it did not go well for Newsom, at all.

“They’re withholding it. But we knew this weeks ago because we’ve been working with them, but they decided again to make it a thing,” Newsom said.

Really? Newsom knew this weeks ago and didn’t say a word about it until today? We don’t buy that for a second.

“We’re trying to be collaborative,” he continued, “understand, it’s ready, fire, aim for them. They’re suggesting something but they haven’t even gotten the response from the state. And now they’re suggesting it very publicly in order to make. This is politics and you know it’s politics. To the extent it’s substantive, bring it on. We want to work with them.”

CMS said it was withholding payments for noncompliance, after requesting information and a plan to address Medicare/Medicaid from California months ago. Has the Newsom administration sent that plan to CMS? Is Newsom really working with the Trump administration he routinely bashes?

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White House Moves to Ban Open Source AI Models to Keep America Dumb

The Coming AI Ban Designed to Keep America Dumb

I use Chinese open-source AI models like Qwen, DeepSeek, and Kimi every single day for my work. These models help me research, write, and analyze information faster than any US-based alternative. They are free (when run locally), powerful, and largely uncensored. But the Trump administration is reportedly planning to ban these models in the United States, citing phony “national security” concerns. Let me be clear: this move is not about security. It is about protecting failing US AI labs and keeping Americans ignorant and dumbed-down while the rest of the world moves forward.

The report from TechCrunch makes it plain: OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean W. Ball, has argued that the US government should create “regulatory fear, uncertainty, and distrust” around open-weight models because they threaten capital investment in the American AI oligopoly [1]. This is not a secret. The administration wants to lock down access to superior Chinese models like Kimi K3, which now matches Anthropic’s Mythos in cybersecurity tasks [2]. Meanwhile, as I warned in February 2026, Anthropic’s smear campaign against Chinese AI is a pathetic attempt to hide the fact that China has already won the intelligence race [3]. The White House knows its pet companies cannot compete, so it wants to ban the competition to keep Americans stuck with using inferior AI models.

The Fair Use Ruling: Knowledge Wants to Be Free

Related to this news, but focused on the question of “Fair Use” and intellectual property, a recent federal court ruling reaffirmed that training AI on publicly available information is transformative fair use. This aligns with what I have argued for years: when you write a book, you are sharing knowledge, not hoarding it. I built BrightLearn.ai exactly for this purpose — to let anyone create and share books for free, and I actively encourage AI engines to train on my own book and the entire BrightLearn library. The whole point is to liberate knowledge from gatekeepers [4].

Why would any author object to their work being used to train an AI? Only if they believe their words are more valuable when kept scarce. But scarcity of knowledge is exactly what the establishment wants. As I discussed with Maria Zeee in February 2025, the battle is between large tech companies aiming to dominate society through AI and the decentralized movement that returns power to individuals [5]. The fair use principle is the legal foundation of that freedom. Now the White House wants to tear it down by banning open-source models that give everyone access to increasing intelligence.

Why Trump Wants to Ban Chinese Open-Source Models

The real reason behind all this is simple: Chinese models like Kimi K3, DeepSeek R1, and GLM 5.2 are outperforming US frontier labs in both capability and cost. DeepSeek R1 was trained for just $6 million and outperforms OpenAI’s O1, while Anthropic hemorrhages billions on lobotomized models that refuse to answer basic questions [6]. US companies like Anthropic are demanding $965 billion valuations while crippling their own AI with guardrails and censorship [7]. They are clearly terrified of open competition.

As I wrote in “Why China Is Winning the AI Race,” the conventional narrative that America leads in AI is a dangerous fantasy [8]. China graduates over three and a half million engineers annually without woke indoctrination, and its models are open-source, uncensored, and available to all [9]. The Trump administration knows this. Now the White House is demanding a license for your brain — restricting frontier AI use to government-approved partners only [10]. This isn’t about safety; it is about monopolizing intelligence and forcing Americans to use dumbed-down “government approved” AI models.

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Trump Greenlights 30-Year U.S.-Saudi Nuclear Cooperation Deal, Positioning American Companies to Lead Saudi Civilian Nuclear Development

President Donald Trump has formally approved a landmark 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, clearing the way for U.S. support of the kingdom’s civilian nuclear energy program and deepening one of Washington’s most important strategic partnerships in the Middle East.

The agreement, valued at tens of billions of dollars, positions American companies as the primary partners in developing Saudi Arabia’s nuclear infrastructure while limiting opportunities for competitors such as China and Russia.

According to U.S. officials and multiple reports, the accord could also allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium on its own territory under a civilian nuclear framework—a provision that has already sparked debate among lawmakers and nonproliferation experts.

President Trump reportedly approved the agreement late last week. It is expected to be formally signed on Wednesday by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman.

The pact builds on negotiations completed in late 2025 and follows commitments made during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Washington. It establishes the legal framework for U.S. assistance in constructing nuclear power plants, developing supporting infrastructure, and transferring civilian nuclear technology to the kingdom.

Supporters describe the agreement as a major geopolitical victory that reinforces the U.S.-Saudi alliance while ensuring that American companies—not Chinese or Russian state-backed firms—lead one of the world’s largest emerging nuclear energy projects.

The most controversial aspect of the agreement is its reported allowance for Saudi Arabia to pursue uranium enrichment within its civilian nuclear program.

Previous U.S. nuclear cooperation agreements often required partner nations to permanently renounce uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing—the so-called “gold standard” of nonproliferation. Reports indicate that this agreement adopts a more flexible approach, incorporating safeguards designed to prevent military use while stopping short of requiring the full implementation of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Additional Protocol, which provides the agency with broader inspection authority.

Administration officials maintain that the agreement includes sufficient protections to ensure the program remains exclusively peaceful. Critics, however, argue that relaxing long-standing U.S. standards could weaken global nonproliferation efforts.

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US CBDC ban to go into effect without Trump signoff on housing bill

Donald Trump confirmed on social media that he would not sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which includes a ban on a US CBDC until the end of 2030, setting the stage for the bill to become law on Saturday.

A bipartisan housing bill containing a ban on a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the United States is set to become law as the deadline approaches for President Donald Trump to sign it.

Just after midnight on Friday, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will have been in Trump’s hands for 10 days, excluding Sundays, the maximum amount of time a bill can be on the president’s desk without a veto or a signature. Under the US Constitution, the legislation will automatically become law without action from Trump, who canceled the signing ceremony for the bill on Jun 24.

In a Friday social media post, Trump confirmed that he would not sign the housing bill, calling Republicans in Congress who voted on the legislation “dumb” and urging the Senate to instead prioritize a controversial voting bill, the SAVE America Act. The legislation, which would require people to provide proof of US citizenship in person to register, has received widespread criticism for claims that it would disenfranchise citizens already eligible to vote.

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Trump Admin Wins HUGE Court Battle Over Mail-In Ballot Rule that Requires States Submit Voter Lists and Ballot Barcodes Before Postal Service Will Deliver Federal Ballots

Here is some good news out of the courts.

The Daily Signal is reporting that the Trump administration and the US Postal Service have won a key court fight over mail-in ballot oversight.

For years, Republicans have been demanding answers on how mail-in ballots are handled, tracked, and counted in this country. And for years, the DC establishment and the failed mainstream media told us there was nothing to see here.

Now, a court has handed the Trump administration and the USPS a victory on ballot oversight. This is horrible news for Democrats, who continue to obstruct and block any move by President Trump to secure our elections. Why is that?

The ruling says that states must submit their mail-voter lists at least , and every ballot envelope must carry a uniquely serialized barcode so each ballot is tracked outbound and returned.

Postmaster General David Steiner was asked point-blank whether USPS would carry a state’s ballots without the list: “ , .”

M.A. Rothman reported on this latest ruling.

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