Tag: donald trump

The Donald Gets a Double-Whammy

It sure looks like the Donald is on the receiving end of a double-whammy. His victory declaration in Iran looks to rank right up there with George Dubya Bush’s “mission accomplished” pratfall on the deck of a US aircraft carrier in 2003; and that also means that his SOTU boasting about defeating “Joe Biden’s” inflation and getting the gas pump price under $2 per gallon is out the window, too.

What’s back in play front and center, therefore, is the AFFORDABILITY issue come November. The Dems have no clue about how to fix it, of course, but they sure as hell will be brutally pounding the GOP candidates and the Donald with the latter’s own bogus hot air on the matter.

For want of doubt, consider the conflagration in the global oil markets at this very moment. At ground zero in the Persian Gulf, the major crude oil from the region have already shot the moon.

Thus, Oman crude prices are up to $154/barrel, crossing $150 for the first time ever. At the same time, Dubai crude is up to $130/barrel, while Brent is trading at $110.

This means, in turn, that the gap between Oman and world prices is off-the-charts wide, and now stands at 30% or $44 per barrel. By comparison, before the Iran War, the difference between all benchmarks was just $5 per barrel during January and February.

In very short-run, of course, Brent and WTI are priced based on US and European supply conditions, while the actual disruption is concentrated in the Middle East, meaning they do not fully capture the severity of the physical shortage. YET.

On the other hand, global crude oil markets everywhere and always eventually get arbitraged, causing the major marker grades to fully reflect worldwide supply, demand and inventory conditions. So unless the Gulf is re-opened within a matter of days, the marker grades will soon rise toward these Gulf prices as global inventories continue to be liquidated.

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Trump Admin Strikes Deal With Energy Firm to Nix Offshore Wind Plans

A global energy corporation based in France has ceded leases off North Carolina and New York, where it planned to spend nearly $1 billion to build offshore wind turbines, back to the U.S. Department of the Interior and will instead redirect that investment into natural gas projects in Texas.

The “landmark agreement” was jointly announced by the department and TotalEnergies in Washington on March 23 and confirmed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné during a press conference at the 44th annual CERAWeek by S&P Global conference at the Hilton Americas-Houston.

Burgum said much of TotalEnergies’ offshore wind investments were tied to Biden-era “green energy” subsidies rather than direct power generation, forcing U.S. taxpayers “to pay for energy sources twice.”

“They were paying for it in terms of high utility bills, but they were all paying for it in terms of the taxpayer subsidies,” he said.

Under the agreement, the department will reimburse TotalEnergies “dollar for dollar” for the $928 million it spent on securing the leases, much of that placed in bonds required to develop federal lands, in exchange for the company agreeing to reinvest that money into a Texas LNG project it was already developing.

The vacated offshore leases were acquired in 2022. They are in the Carolina Long Bay area off North Carolina and in the New York Bight off Long Island.

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Iran threatens to ‘completely’ close Strait of Hormuz and hit power plants after Trump ultimatum

 The United States and Iran threatened to target critical infrastructure Sunday as the war in the Middle East, now in its fourth week, puts lives and livelihoods at risk throughout the region.

Iran said the Strait of Hormuz, crucial to oil and other exports, would be “completely closed” immediately if the U.S. follows up on President Donald Trump’s threat to attack its power plants. Trump late Saturday set a 48-hour deadline to open the strait.

Israeli leaders visited one of two southern communities near a secretive nuclear research site struck by Iranian missiles late Saturday, with scores of people wounded. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was a “miracle” no one was killed.

Netanyahu claimed Israel and the U.S. were well on their way to achieving their war goals. The aims have ranged from weakening Iran’s nuclear program, missile program and support for armed proxies to enabling the Iranian people to overthrow the theocracy.

There has been no sign of an uprising, nor of an end to the fighting that has shaken the global economy, sent oil prices surging and endangered some of the world’s busiest air corridors. The war, which the U.S. and Israel launched Feb. 28, has killed over 2,000 people.

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah claimed responsibility for an airstrike that killed a man in northern Israel, while Lebanese President Joseph Aoun called Israel’s new targeting of bridges in the south “a prelude to a ground invasion.”

“More weeks of fighting against Iran and Hezbollah are expected for us,” said Israeli military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin.

Meanwhile, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates said early Monday their air defenses were dealing with missile and drone attacks as air raid sirens sounded in Bahrain.

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War Becomes Spectacle in Trump’s Horrific Propaganda Promoting War in Iran

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to be an antiwar candidate, boasting that, unlike his predecessors, he would end endless wars and keep the United States out of new military conflicts. Yet the trajectory of his presidency has unfolded in the opposite direction. From expanding military confrontations in the Caribbean to the escalating war with Iran, launched through large-scale strikes that risk igniting a wider regional catastrophe, Trump’s rule has increasingly relied on the language and machinery of war. As Zachary Basu points out in Axios, “he has attacked seven nations [and] authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.”

What makes this moment particularly disturbing is not only the violence itself, but also the way it is staged and celebrated. As the conflict with Iran intensified, the White House circulated promotional videos that fused real footage of bombing raids with visuals drawn from video games and action films, transforming acts of destruction into a spectacle of national triumph. In such images, war appears not as tragedy or political catastrophe but as thrilling display, inviting viewers to admire the technological performance of power while remaining detached from the human suffering it produces. These spectacles are more than crude propaganda. They reveal a deeper shift in political culture in which violence is aestheticized, cruelty normalized, and militarism staged as entertainment, training the public to experience domination not as a catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of power.

We live in an age of monsters. More than two centuries ago, Francisco Goya captured such a moment in his haunting 1799 etching, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” an image that now reads less like a relic of the Enlightenment than a prophecy of our own time. The Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci described moments like this as periods of historical crisis, writing that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Our present moment bears all the marks of such an interregnum.

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Trump is strategizing means to seize Iran’s nuclear stockpiles, sources say

The Trump administration has been strategizing methods and options to secure or extract Iran’s nuclear materials, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions, as a U.S.-Israel-led military campaign against Tehran enters a more uncertain phase. 

The timing of any such an operation — if President Trump were to order it — remained unclear Friday night. One source said he has made no decision yet. 

But planning has centered on the possible deployment of forces from the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, the elite military unit often tasked with the most sensitive counter-proliferation missions, two of the sources told CBS News. 

A White House spokeswoman said it’s the Pentagon’s job to make preparations.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon didn’t immediately comment. 

Mr. Trump in a Truth Social post Friday evening said: “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran.”

The private deliberations on the nuclear material come amid an evolving conflict that in its opening focused on degrading Iran’s conventional military capabilities — including air defenses, missile systems and key infrastructure tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

That initial wave of strikes carried out by U.S. and Israeli forces was intended to blunt Iran’s ability to retaliate across the region. However, despite the onslaught from the air, Iran has been able to counterstrike on Israel and U.S.-allied countries in the Gulf region, and has halted most oil shipments by threatening ships. 

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White House AI Framework Pushes Age Verification ID Mandate

The White House has published a National AI Legislative Framework, a set of recommendations to Congress intended to govern artificial intelligence with a single uniform standard rather than, as the document puts it, “a patchwork of conflicting state laws.”

The administration wants federal law to preempt the states. That part is straightforward. What the framework actually proposes is less straightforward.

Alongside a genuine free speech provision, the document contains age verification mandates, chat surveillance requirements, national security carve-outs that would tighten the relationship between AI companies and federal intelligence agencies, and an expansion of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a law that we have already flagged for lacking adequate safeguards against censorship.

The White House is presenting all of this as part of the same coherent package.

Start with the child protection section: Congress should establish “commercially reasonable, privacy protective, age-assurance requirements (such as parental attestation) for AI platforms and services likely to be accessed by minors.” Age verification on AI platforms. The framework calls these requirements “privacy protective.”  They are not.

There is no version of meaningful age verification that doesn’t require collecting sensitive personal data, and there is no version of collecting sensitive personal data at scale that isn’t a breach waiting to happen.

The only tools platforms have are identity-based checks, government IDs, biometric scans, credit card data, and third-party verification services, or biometric estimation.

The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are.

In October 2025, Discord identified 70,000 users globally who potentially had their photo IDs exposed to hackers.

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The Ellisons are building a media empire. Trump keeps cheering them on.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly celebrated the wealthy Ellison family’s growing media empire in recent days, even as the Trump administration is reviewing Paramount Skydance’s deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and its assets including CNN for $110 billion.

“The Ellison family, two great people, great people. It’s a great family,” Trump said Monday, in remarks ahead of a Kennedy Center board meeting that referenced CBS and its upcoming broadcast of a UFC event.

On Friday, Hegseth called Warner Bros.-owned CNN’s coverage of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran “fake news” after it reported that the administration had underestimated the risk of disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Hegseth said. A spokeswoman for CNN declined to comment on his remarks.

CNN, a longtime target of Trump’s complaints about the media, is among the most prominent assets in Paramount’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros., which requires approval from the Justice Department.

Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle and a longtime friend and ally to Trump, has financially backstopped Paramount’s pending deal to buy Warner Bros. and is also a major investor in the White House-blessed deal that spun off TikTok into a U.S. company. That has helped rebrand the tech billionaire and his son David into media tycoons — with some help from Trump.

The administration’s posture toward Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn scrutiny since a bidding war erupted over the troubled media giant late last year.

After Netflix announced an $83 billion deal in December to buy most of Warner Bros. Discovery and spin off CNN and other cable properties, Trump told reporters he would be “involved” in deciding whether to approve it, citing the streaming giant’s market power as a potential concern.

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Trump administration making heavy preparations for potential use of ground troops in Iran

Pentagon officials have made detailed preparations for deploying U.S. ground forces into Iran, multiple sources briefed on the discussions told CBS News. 

Senior military commanders have submitted specific requests aimed at preparing for such an option as President Trump weighs moves in the U.S.-Israel-led conflict with Iran, the sources said. 

Mr. Trump has been deliberating whether to position ground forces in the region, sources said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. It was unclear under what circumstances he would authorize the use of troops on the ground. 

“No, I’m not putting troops anywhere,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday when asked about ground troops, but quickly added: “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

Officials at U.S. Central Command referred questions from CBS News to the White House and Pentagon. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement: “It’s the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the Commander in Chief maximum optionality, it does not mean the President has made a decision, and as the President said in the Oval Office yesterday, he is not planning to send ground troops anywhere at this time.”

The military has also held meetings to prepare for how to handle the possible detention of Iranian soldiers and paramilitary operatives if the president decides to put American boots on the ground – including where the Iranians would be sent, two sources said. 

The U.S. is preparing to deploy elements of the 82nd Airborne Division into the Middle East region. 

The planning involves the Army’s Global Response Force and the Marine Corps’ Marine Expeditionary Unit. 

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United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and Canada Will Now Join US to Keep the Strait of Hormuz Open

The leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and Canada have now signaled they will join the United States in a coalition to secure and keep open the critical Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil chokepoint the bloodthirsty Iranian regime has turned into a terrorist kill zone.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, the radical Islamic mullahs in Tehran launched a desperate campaign of economic terrorism after U.S. and Israeli strikes hammered their nuclear sites and terror infrastructure.

Iran mined the strait, attacked unarmed commercial vessels, targeted oil facilities, and effectively closed the waterway that carries nearly 20-25% of the world’s oil supply.

President Trump refused to let America shoulder the entire burden alone. He blasted the freeloading “allies,” took to Truth Social, and demanded that nations dependent on Middle Eastern oil step up and send warships.

“Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated,” Trump said.

He even threatened to “finish off” Iran and let NATO and Asia handle the mess if they wouldn’t get in gear. As we reported, the initial responses from Europe were weak and uninspiring, classic globalist foot-dragging.

Now, with Iran’s attacks growing more brazen and the Strait’s security directly tied to global oil flows, those same allies are signaling that they are prepared to stand with the United States.

That does not yet mean all seven countries have announced warship deployments.

The joint statement so far supports that they have formally backed efforts to keep passage open and are ready to contribute, while some governments are still working through what their exact role will be.

Britain, for example, has been publicly discussing possible deployments, including ships and mine-countermeasure assets, but final national commitments appear to remain in motion.

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US Fast-Tracks Billions In ‘Emergency’ Arms Sales To Gulf, Bypassing Congress

On the one hand President Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth have declared that America is ‘winning’ against Iran, having destroyed its navy and air defenses, and having seriously degraded its missiles – but on the other the admin has put in for a more than $200 billion supplemental request to Congress to fund the war.

It seems Congress will likely eventually sign off on this gargantuan figure – for an ‘excursion’ which should end ‘soon’ we are told by Trump – given that even the effort to pass so much as a War Powers resolution gets repeatedly stymied. 

Still, the US administration is busy bypassing standard congressional review requirements, on Thursday approving a series of emergency arms sales across the Middle East, at a moment US regional allies are being pummeled by Iranian drones and ballistic missiles.

The argument is that Washington’s allies are in imminent danger, and given that indeed vital Gulf infrastructure is getting hit quite seriously – new arms have to be rushed over there on an emergency basis.

According to details in Saudi-owned Al Arabiya:

The largest package was approved for the United Arab Emirates, totaling more than $8 billion. It includes the $4.5 billion sale of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), $2.10 billion for FS-LIDS counter-drone systems, $1.22 billion in Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs), and $644 million in F-16 munitions, including GBU-39 small diameter bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).

In parallel, Washington approved an $8 billion deal for Kuwait to buy Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor Radars, significantly enhancing the country’s missile detection and tracking capabilities.

Jordan was also included in the emergency approvals, with a $70.5 million package covering aircraft support and munitions to sustain operational readiness.

Notably, a US base all the way over in Jordan, the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, was struck by Iran in the opening days of the war, satellite imagery showed.

This development of all these newly approved ’emergency’ arms and weapons shipments begs the question: is this more evidence that Washington is settling in for a ‘long war’?

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