Tag: donald trump

Christian Nationalists in US Government Push Attacks on Iran as Holy War

How Christian clergy talk about Jesus this Easter Sunday will tell you a lot about their politics. While parishioners in the U.S. are likely to be greeted by the traditional refrain, “He is risen,” at their April 5 Easter service, they’re just as likely to be met with the phrase, “Christ is King.” This rhetoric replaces the traditional understanding of Easter as a celebration of Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection with a more aggressive vision of a warrior Jesus that resonates strongly with Donald Trump-aligned white Christian nationalists.

The phrase “Christ is King” isn’t new — it’s sometimes used by Christians to refer to the belief that Jesus’s divine rule goes beyond that of earthly leaders. But the phrase has recently become “a kind of rallying cry for Christian supremacy,” historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Truthout.

Over the last few years, the slogan has spread from far right provocateurs like Nick Fuentes to Trump’s cabinet and the military. In February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used the phrase at a convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, galvanizing Christian nationalists’ thirst for authoritarian rulers whose Jesus is defined by militant masculinity — more like a crusader or cowboy than the peace-loving, “sacrificial lamb” celebrated on Easter, who was executed for challenging the hierarchies of empire.

Along the way, the phrase has become a dog whistle for antisemitism, and it’s often combined with other Christian nationalist “holy war” rhetoric that has been spiking since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

Popular Christian Zionist preachers like John Hagee came out of the gate praising Operation Epic Fury in a sermon from March 10. On March 23, Rep. Andy Ogles posted an AI-generated video of himself, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio dressed as crusaders with the caption: “This is a battle of good vs evil. We must reaffirm that our nation was built on Christian principles.” Their language and iconography distract from the fact that the U.S. and Israel’s attacks on Iran were launched without congressional approval, are unpopular, and have killed more than 1,500 people.

Keep reading

Trapped by His Own Image: Trump’s Iran War and the Politics of Ego

The judgment on the Trump administration’s war on Iran is already largely settled across mainstream media, public opinion, and much of the analytical sphere.

What remains supportive of the war is limited to two predictable camps: official government discourse and the president’s most loyal supporters, along with entrenched pro-Israel constituencies.

Beyond these circles, the war is widely understood as reckless, unjustified, and strategically incoherent.

Among the wider American public, this conclusion is not abstract. It is shaped by growing unease, economic anxiety, and a mounting sense that the war lacks both purpose and direction.

Since the outbreak of the war on February 28, 2026, polling has consistently pointed in one direction. A Pew Research poll in late March found that 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict.

Another AP-NORC survey showed that six in ten Americans believe US military action against Iran has already “gone too far,” while even Fox News polling found 58 percent opposition.

These numbers confirm a broader trend that began early in the war and has only intensified. Reuters reported on March 19 that just 7 percent of Americans support a full-scale ground invasion.

In that same reporting, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe Trump is likely to pursue one anyway, highlighting a growing disconnect between policy and public will.

Days later, Reuters noted that Trump’s approval rating had dropped to 36 percent, with rising fuel prices and economic instability cited as key drivers.

The longer the war continues, the more its consequences are internalized by ordinary Americans, turning distant conflict into immediate economic pressure.

Among the American intelligentsia, opposition is no longer confined to traditional anti-war circles. It now spans ideological boundaries, including segments of Trump’s own political base.

Reporting from the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference, The Guardian observed that many MAGA supporters warned the war risks becoming another “forever war.”

This convergence is significant, reflecting not a passing disagreement but a deeper structural shift in public perception.

Yet mainstream media – from CNN to Fox News – has largely avoided confronting what many Americans already recognize: that the war aligns closely with the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Within Washington itself, unease is also becoming more explicit. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that lawmakers from both parties are increasingly skeptical of the administration’s approach.

At the strategic level, the war’s foundational assumptions have already begun to unravel. Israel’s early calculations that escalation might trigger internal collapse in Iran have failed to materialize.

Iran’s political system remains intact, its leadership stable, and its military cohesion unbroken under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

At the same time, Tehran has demonstrated its ability to retaliate across multiple fronts, targeting Israeli territory and US military assets in the region.

Keep reading

Chief Justice John Roberts Appears Set to Throw a Wrench in Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Case

Chief Justice John Roberts signaled Wednesday that he might act as a thorn in President Donald Trump’s side.

During oral arguments over Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship, Roberts pushed back against Solicitor General John Sauer, who made the president’s argument.

Specifically, Roberts sounded skeptical that the Fourteenth Amendment, on which birthright citizenship rests, excludes children of illegal immigrants.

“Based on Chinese media reports,” Sauer said in a clip posted to the social media platform X, “there are 500 — 500 — birth-tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China, whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation.”

“Having said all that,” Roberts replied, “you do agree that that has no impact on the legal analysis before us?”

Sauer did not agree. Instead, he respectfully cited the late Justice Antonin Scalia in arguing that 19th-century Americans did not foresee such things. In other words, the people who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend it for the children of illegal immigrants.

“Well, it certainly wasn’t a problem in the 19th century,” Roberts responded.

Keep reading

Trump Says He ‘Strongly’ Considering Withdrawing From NATO

President Donald Trump said that NATO is a “paper tiger” and he was considering pulling the US out of the Cold War-era alliance. This week, multiple NATO states declared that the US could not use their airspace for attacks on Iran. 

“I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way,” the President said in an interview with The Telegraph on Wednesday. He added that he was seriously considering leaving NATO. 

NATO was created after WWII to prevent the USSR from further expanding into Europe. After the fall of the USSR, NATO expanded eastward into several former members of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. After the bloc attempted to add Ukraine as a member, Russia invaded and demanded that Kiev agree to neutrality. 

The bloc has used Ukraine as a proxy force to weaken Russia. 

While Trump has floated the idea of exiting NATO throughout his political career, he has been irked by the bloc’s response to the war against Iran. Several NATO countries have refused to assist the US and Israel in the conflict, and others have barred US warplanes from their airspace. 

“Beyond not being there, it was actually hard to believe. And I didn’t do a big sale. I just said, ‘Hey’, you know, I didn’t insist too much. I just think it should be automatic.” The President continued in his remarks to The Telegraph. “We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”

Keep reading

Trump Administration Illegally Ended Parole for Immigrants Who Used Biden-Era App: Judge

The Trump administration failed to follow proper procedure when it terminated temporary protection for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, a federal judge said on March 31.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary can terminate parole, the temporary protection, but must only do so after finding that “the purposes of such parole … have been served,” according to federal law.

The Biden administration granted parole for more than 900,000 illegal immigrants in 2025, according to lawyers for some of the immigrants. Government officials ended the parole in 2025 after the DHS secretary found the purposes of the parole had been served.

But officials provided no documentation of that determination, meaning that the DHS did not adhere to the law and agency rules, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said on March 31.

“Accordingly, the parole terminations exceeded the agency’s statutory authority and contradicted the procedures set forth in its own regulations,” she said in a 25-page ruling.

Burroughs vacated an April 2025 email sent by officials to some foreign nationals who had been granted parole, telling them, “It is time for you to leave the United States” and “please depart the United States immediately.”

Keep reading

Israel Is Making Sure Trump Can’t Find an Off-Ramp in Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have persuaded Donald Trump that a war on Iran would unfold much like the pager attack in Lebanon 18 months ago.

The two militaries would jointly decapitate the leadership in Tehran, and it would crumble just as Hezbollah had collapsed – or so it then seemed – after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese group’s spiritual leader and military strategist.

If so, Trump bought deeply into this ruse. He assumed that he would be the US president to “remake the Middle East” – a mission his predecessors had baulked at since George W Bush’s dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.

Netanyahu directed Trump’s gaze to Israel’s supposed “audacious feat” in Lebanon. The US president should have been looking elsewhere: to Israel’s colossal moral and strategic failure in Gaza.

There, Israel spent two years pummeling the tiny coastal enclave into dust, starving the population, and destroying all civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.

Netanyahu publicly declared that Israel was “eradicating Hamas”, Gaza’s civilian government and its armed resistance movement that had refused for two decades to submit to Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade of the territory.

In truth, as pretty much every legal and human rights expert long ago concluded, what Israel was actually doing was committing genocide – and, in the process, tearing up the rules of war that had governed the period following the Second World War.

But two and a half years into Israel’s destruction of Gaza, Hamas is not only still standing, it is in charge of the ruins.

Israel may have shrunk by some 60 per cent the size of the concentration camp the people of Gaza are locked into, but Hamas is far from vanquished.

Rather, Israel is the one that has retreated to a safe zone, from which it is resuming a war of attrition on Gaza’s survivors.

Keep reading

Iran fires back with flat denial after Trump claims Tehran requested ceasefire: ‘False and baseless’

Iran is pushing back on President Donald Trump’s claim that it requested a ceasefire, with an official calling the statement “false and baseless in a blunt public denial.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, made the remarks rejecting Trump’s claim on Wednesday, according to a report on Iranian state television.

Trump made the claim about Iran requesting a ceasefire in a Truth Social post Wednesday morning. But the president indicated that the U.S. will only entertain the prospect once the Strait of Hormuz is open for ships.

“Iran’s New Regime President, much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors, has just asked the United States of America for a CEASEFIRE! We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!” Trump asserted in the post.

Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, however, issued its own statement saying the Strait of Hormuz “is firmly and decisively under the control” of its forces.

“This strait will not be opened to the enemies of this nation through the ridiculous spectacle by the president of the United States,” it said.

Keep reading

Trump Reportedly Orders Probe on Assisted Suicide of Spanish Gang-Rape Victim, and Socialist Ministers Are Outraged at Him

Trump is taking on the European ‘death culture’.

We have been following the horrifying case of Spanish 25-year-old Noelia Castillo, who became a victim of rape by migrants, and finally ‘opted’ for the Assisted Suicide, as you can read in Globalist State-Sanctioned Suicide: Spain to Euthanize 25-Year-Old Gang-Rape Victim Abandoned in Migrant-Filled Juvenile Center.

But while Castillo’s life ended early, the repercussions seem to be far from over.

It turns out that the Donald J. Trump administration is ‘demanding answers from Spain’.

The New York Post reported:

“A leaked diplomatic cable, obtained by The Post, shows the State Department instructed the US Embassy in Madrid Tuesday to open an investigation into the Spanish law enforcement’s handling of repeated sex attacks, including gang rapes, against Castillo leading up to her tragic death.”

Keep reading

A Baron of Lies Turns the World Upside Down—and Loses

Comedians are being deprived of their creativity: to turn Trump’s remarks into slapstick, you only have to do one thing—nothing at all. If you just let him speak, he provides “top-notch” entertainment at the lowest possible level. Less amusing is the fact that the Western media, which purports to offer reporting and analysis, takes this utter nonsense seriously. If you follow experts in the West, you’ll rub your eyes and ears in disbelief. Never before have reporting and assessments been so riddled with nonsense and so far removed from reality. The people and media of the West, in their Diederich Hessling-like subservience, don’t even begin to realize that they are being led into disaster by the powerful in Israel and the US. Instead of preparing people for the fact that the West—above all Europe—is heading toward collapse and deprivation, rosy forecasts are being issued

Yet careful research certainly makes it possible to paint a realistic picture. This is a laborious task, as the entire West has conspired to lie to the world. Through censorship and AI, the circles that shape public opinion and shape policy have the means to make Western populations believe that the Israelis are the good guys and that the Americans will prevail. This is nothing new: there have always been only winners in a war. Thus, the Nazis tried to convince their people until 1945 that final victory was tantalisingly close. During the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Americans “won,” and Russia has been “losing” in Ukraine for four years. And now the Americans and Israelis are “winning” in Iran, Lebanon, indeed throughout the entire Middle East.

The fact that this propaganda cannot be true is also evident from the fact that the claims are becoming increasingly fantastical—even the famous Baron Münchhausen would blush.

As always in my reporting, this is merely an attempt to describe and analyze the overall situation. Too many factors are at play simultaneously around the world, and when conducting an analysis, there is always a risk that one might omit certain facts—deeming them irrelevant to the overall trend—only to be proven wrong by reality later on.

Keep reading

“We’re Going to Bring Them Back to the Stone Ages” – Trump Says Iran Strikes Will Continue and All Objectives Will Be Completed “Very Shortly”, Suggests He Will Let the Strait of Hormuz Reopen “Naturally”

President Trump on Wednesday addressed the nation with an update on the Iran war, where he announced that the US is close to completing all objectives of Operation Epic Fury and appeared to signal an approaching end to the war regardless of whether Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz.

The President spoke for just over 18 and a half minutes in his Wednesday night address.

During the address, Trump declared, “tonight, I’m pleased to say that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion” after highlighting the decimation of Iran’s Navy, Air Force, missile progran, and ability to support terrorist proxies.

With regard to the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has blocked by targeting oil tankers navigating the critical shipping artery, Trump said, “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait, and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it.”

He continued, “The countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.”

“Go to the Strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” Trump demanded, adding, “Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done. So, it should be easy.” If countries do not step up and finish off Iran, he said, “buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much.”

Still, “In any event, when this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally,” Trump said, noting Iran’s dependence on the flow of oil through the Strait.

Keep reading