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Donald Trump’s anti-war pledge tested as Israel’s attack on Iran splits Maga base

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Donald Trump’s anti-war pledge tested as Israel’s attack on Iran splits Maga base

Donald Trump won last year’s US election promising to be a president of peace. With America now at risk of being dragged into a new war between Israel and Iran, that pledge is looking increasingly hollow.

Trump said on the campaign trail that he could easily resolve the conflict in Gaza, use diplomacy to halt Iran’s nuclear programme and end the war between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office.

In his victory speech in November, he said: “They said, ‘he will start a war’. I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.”

It was a message that held huge appeal for American voters tired of decades of US military interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan — the seemingly interminable engagements Trump frequently referred to as America’s “forever wars”.

Yet the fear is growing among Trump’s loyal Maga base that Israel’s strikes against Iran on Thursday night will embroil an anti-war president in another foreign military entanglement — this time between the two biggest military powers in the Middle East.

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Donald Trump at Fort Bragg on Tuesday. The president on Friday said the Iranians officials the US had been dealing with in the nuclear negotiations were ‘all dead’ following Israel’s strike on the Middle Eastern country © Stan Gilliland/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist in his first term, said US and Israeli interests were not necessarily identical in the current crisis.

“They [the Israelis] are Israel First, we need to always be America First,” he said. “And in Jerusalem they should reflect on the message of Christ: live by the sword, die by the sword.”

Asked by the Financial Times whether he feared the US would be dragged into a war with Iran, he replied: “Very much.”

It is a fear that is widely shared among Trump’s supporters, as concerns grow that beyond the missile attacks on Israel on Friday afternoon, Tehran might also hit at US military assets in the region. “Israel is trying to get Iran to attack us just like your bitchy ex who tried goading some dude in a bar to fight you,” Tim Pool, the popular rightwing podcaster, wrote on X.

“Is the United States about to be sucked into yet another war in the Middle East?” said Jack Posobiec, an far-right media personality. “Because that’s exactly the opposite of what . . . President Trump campaigned for back in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin.”

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Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist in his first term
Steve Bannon said he feared the US would be dragged into a war with Iran © Al Drago/Bloomberg

Posobiec was speaking on Thoughtcrime, a video roundtable hosted by rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk, just as details of the Israeli strikes were coming in. Both indicated the Israeli action would set alarm bells ringing among Trump’s base.

“This is going to schism Maga terribly online,” Kirk said. “You’re going to see — I don’t want to say a Maga civil war, but it’s going to be a Maga online food fight [which] is going to be very hard to navigate.”

Kirk later posted hawks would be urging the US to “finish off the mullahs”. But he warned: “America’s interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were all easy at the start. It was in the months and years afterwards that they became costly, wasteful quagmires. None of them were worth it.”

On the same podcast, Tyler Bowyer, an activist at conservative non-profit Turning Point USA said: “If you could probably sum up President Trump’s campaign from 2024, it was that electing me is going to prevent world war three.”

“One of Trump’s biggest promises was ‘with me you’ll get less war — I’m the anti-war president’,” Bowyer added.

rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk
Rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk said the hawks would be urging the US to ‘finish off the mullahs’ © Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Matthew Boyle, Washington bureau chief of rightwing populist news website Breitbart, said Trump faces a precarious balancing act, keeping the US out of a wider war while continuing to back Israel, one of America’s closest allies, and ensuring Iran never gets a nuclear bomb.

“What he does from here could define his presidency,” he said. “But if there’s anyone who can handle such a perilous situation, it’s President Trump.”

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Complicating matters for the president’s Maga supporters was the fog of uncertainty over Trump’s real position on the Israeli attack. In late May, he said he had warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack Iran while Washington was negotiating with Tehran over a nuclear deal.

That initially led some observers to speculate that Netanyahu had gone against US wishes in launching its attack, an impression enhanced by secretary of state Marco Rubio who said the US had not been involved and described the strikes as a “unilateral action” by Israel.

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Donald Trump in April. The US president on Friday said Washington had known about Israel’s attack on Iran in advance © Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

But on Friday Trump came out in support of the Israeli strikes, telling the Wall Street Journal that Washington had known about them in advance. He called them the “greatest thing ever for the market” because they would stop Iran developing “a nuclear weapon that was a great threat to humanity”.

“Trump has now praised Israel’s strike, affirmed US material support, and Israeli media is reporting his public opposition was a disinformation campaign to mislead Iran,” said Saagar Enjeti, rightwing co-host of the podcast Breaking Points. “So in other words Trump, not Israel, has made a mockery of all of us [who] wanted to avoid this war.”

But Breitbart’s Boyle said he firmly believed Trump’s goal of a historic deal to end Iran’s nuclear programme could still be in reach, despite the Israeli assault — and that the chances of it happening had now increased.

“If anything, what Israel did strengthens Trump’s hand in negotiations with the Iranians,” he said. “It might create leverage that didn’t exist before.”

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This echoed Trump’s comments. In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Friday he said the Iranian “hardliners” the US had been dealing with in the nuclear negotiations were “all dead”.

Asked by Bash if Israel had killed them, he replied: “They didn’t die of the flu.”

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

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“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

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Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

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Reigning champion Argentina escapes with remarkable World Cup victory over Egypt

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Reigning champion Argentina escapes with remarkable World Cup victory over Egypt

Lionel Messi #10 of Argentina celebrates scoring his team’s second goal during their World Cup match against Egypt in Atlanta on Tuesday.

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They looked beaten. And out. Argentina, the defending World Cup champion and No. 1-ranked team, was down 2-0 late against Egypt.

Then, in a span of 13 remarkable minutes, Argentina scored not once, not twice, but three times, capping a comeback for the ages and leaving Egypt stunned and shellshocked.

For much of the game in Atlanta, Egypt was in control, hobbling Argentina early. The Egyptian attack began almost immediately with a stunning header goal delivered by Yasser Ibrahim in the 15th minute. After that, Egypt’s defense closed ranks, making it practically impossible for Argentina to equalize.

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It was downhill from there for the Argentines: team captain Lionel Messi failed to convert a penalty kick, and in the 67th minute, Egypt got a second goal from Mostafa Ziko (after an earlier Egyptian goal had been disallowed after a video review). It looked like Argentina was finished. On the brink of elimination.

But no one told the Argentine players that.

In the 79th minute, Lionel Messi began doing his thing. He fired a cross near the Egyptian goal, and Cristian Romero headed it in. Messi was not done. Four minutes later, he powered a shot past the Egyptian keeper. It was his eighth goal of this tournament, the most of any player. The score was 2-2.

Then, in stoppage time, yet another Argentina header and another goal, this time from Enzo Fernandez.

“This is the World Cup for you,” said Messi after the game. “It wasn’t easy to come back from two goals down. But as I always say, this group never gives up. We always try to fight until the end.”

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French referee François Letexier speaks with Egypt forward Mohamed Salah during the World Cup Round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt in Atlanta.

French referee François Letexier speaks with Egypt forward Mohamed Salah during the World Cup Round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt in Atlanta.

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Afterward, Egypt coach Hossam Hassan complained about the French referee and the officiating. “I am not convinced. I am not convinced with this outcome. I’m not convinced with the way things unfolded during this match,” said Hassan in a post-match news conference. “We have been treated unfairly today. We have suffered injustice.”

“We would have deserved to earn this win, but we are leaving with honor, with pride, regardless of this defeat,” said Hossan.

African soccer teams have been the stars of this World Cup. Morocco has yet to lose a game. Cape Verde qualified for the first time in its history and stymied Spain, Uruguay and Saudi Arabia. Argentina barely beat them in a nail-biter of a match.

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