Politics
Trump projects confidence, claims Iran is ‘begging’ for deal, but war exit remains murky
President Trump on Thursday continued projecting confidence in the U.S. war effort in Iran, suggesting online and during a high-level Cabinet meeting that Iran has been “obliterated,” that its leaders were “begging” for a deal, and that the U.S. is “roaming free” over Iran and “NEEDS NOTHING” from its European allies.
His description of the war as all but finished — he actually said “we’ve won” — stood in contrast to the facts on the ground, where Iran continued to launch attacks and threaten oil tanker traffic in the vital Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. continued sending troops and warships to what is already the largest U.S. military buildup in the Middle East in decades.
Trump’s framing of the conflict also contrasted with that of Iranian officials, who have remained publicly defiant, downplayed negotiations and outwardly rejected several of Trump’s conditions for ending the war — as Trump himself acknowledged, accusing them of saying one thing in private and another in public.
“They better get serious soon, before it is too late,” the president wrote on social media, “because once that happens, there is NO TURNING BACK, and it won’t be pretty.”
“They are begging to make a deal, not me,” Trump reiterated later Thursday, while hosting his first Cabinet meeting since the war began. “Anybody that sees what is happening understands why they are begging to make a deal.”
Trump asserted that Iran’s military capabilities have been destroyed, and that the American mission is “ahead of schedule.” He said American forces were operating without opposition over Iran, and “there’s not a damn thing they can do about it” because they’ve been “beat to s—.”
Trump’s outward confidence, a defining feature of the war campaign that has been consistently echoed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other administration loyalists, continued despite growing concerns this week in Congress — and not only from Democrats.
Several Republicans emerged from a classified war briefing Wednesday clearly frustrated with the administration for not providing a clearer picture of the path out of the now monthlong war, or clear answers on whether it planned to deploy ground troops.
“We want to know more about what’s going on,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “We’re just not getting enough answers.”
“I can see why he might have said that,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Democrats have hammered the president — contrasting the war and its massive budget with rising fuel costs for average Americans and lamenting the deaths of U.S. service members.
“Thirteen American lives lost and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent in just three weeks since Donald Trump plunged us into war without congressional authorization. There is still no plan, no clear justification, and no end in sight,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said. “Americans called for lower prices, not endless wars.”
For weeks, Trump, Hegseth and other war leaders such as Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have focused on U.S. wins in the conflict — tallying up Iran’s sunken ships and grounded planes, assassinated leaders and undermined missile capabilities.
In recent days, Trump has suggested that, because of those wins, Iran is buckling. He has said the U.S. is pushing a 15-point plan that will forever block Iran from developing a nuclear weapon or threatening the U.S. or its allies. And he and others in his administration have accused the media of ignoring battlefield wins to harp on losses instead.
Israel, America’s major partner in the conflict, has projected similar confidence while showing no signs of slowing its attacks on Iran. On Thursday it announced it had killed several senior Iranian naval commanders, including Commodore Alireza Tangsiri, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ navy.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said the deaths should send a “clear message” that Israel will continue to hunt down top Iranian military officials. Iran did not immediately acknowledge Tangsiri’s death.
The head of U.S. Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, praised Tangsiri’s killing, said U.S. strikes would continue, and called on Iranian fighters to “immediately abandon their post and return home to avoid further risk of unnecessary injury or death.”
Meanwhile, death, destruction and environmental and economic damage from the war spread far beyond Iran, where officials recently increased their estimated death toll to nearly 2,000.
Israel was fighting off a barrage of incoming missiles Thursday, with booms heard in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and an impact reported in the central town of Kafr Qassem. Israel was also continuing its offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the death toll had risen to 1,116, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Thursday.
Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Tahsin al Khafaj on Thursday said 23 people had been wounded in a Wednesday strike on a military clinic in western Iraq’s Anbar province.
Israeli soldiers grieve during the funeral of Staff Sgt. Ori Greenberg, 21, at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem on Thursday.
(Odd Andersen / AFP via Getty Images)
Thousands of additional U.S. troops are on their way to the region, while many of the tens of thousands already stationed there have been displaced into hotels and other temporary housing — diminishing their war-fighting capabilities — by ongoing Iranian attacks that have left the 13 regional military bases they normally live on “all but uninhabitable,” the New York Times reported.
Iran announced Thursday that it had launched drone and missile attacks on a U.S. military base in Kuwait and a separate air base used by American forces in Saudi Arabia.
Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi, the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, accused Iran of charging fees for ships to safely transit the Strait of Hormuz, continuing the economic toll on global oil supplies. Environmental experts warned of massive pollution from burning oil and gas fields.
France’s Defense Ministry said Thursday that nearly three dozen countries had joined military talks about how to reopen the strait “once the intensity of hostilities has sufficiently decreased.”
Russia, emboldened by the Iran war, which has drawn resources away from Ukraine and led the U.S. to ease sanctions on Russian oil, has launched a renewed spring offensive against Ukraine.
The distance between U.S. and Iranian messaging about the war and their negotiations to end it — which foreign officials have said are occurring through intermediaries — has contributed to the tensions and the reluctance of allies to get involved, with some citing similar frustrations as Republicans in Congress this week.
Many allies have largely stayed out of the conflict despite Trump vacillating between demanding their help and insisting it isn’t necessary.
In one of his posts to social media Thursday morning, Trump blasted allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, for having “DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO HELP” in the conflict, and said the U.S. would “never forget.”
Asked during his Cabinet meeting about his desire to end the war soon, Trump said he was “the opposite of desperate” — “I don’t care,” he said — and that there “are other targets that we want to hit before we leave.”
Trump said that when the “right deal” is made with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz will reopen — while insisting that Iran no longer has any “mine droppers” that would threaten merchant vessels passing through the key oil route.
Steve Witkoff, one of Trump’s top advisors leading the negotiations in the Middle East, said the Iranians were looking for an “offramp,” that Pakistan is serving as a mediator between Washington and Tehran, and that the 15-point plan Trump had mentioned “forms the framework for a peace deal.”
“These are sensitive, diplomatic discussions and you have directed us to maintain confidentiality on the specific terms and not negotiate through the news media, as others do,” Witkoff said. “We will see where things lead and if we can convince Iran that this is the inflection point, with no good alternatives for them other than more death and destruction.”
Trump has declined to say whom Washington is negotiating with in Iran, but described them as “very smart,” “not fools,” and “very lousy fighters, but great negotiators.”
He also said he knows they are “the right people” for the U.S. to be dealing with because they had given him a “present” — and proved they are in control — by allowing “eight big boats of oil” travel through the strait this week.
Asked if he intended to send U.S. troops into Iran to take its enriched uranium, he called it a “ridiculous question” that he wouldn’t answer.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he is confident that more merchant vessels will soon be able to safely pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and energy prices will drop when the war ends.
“Many people, especially the Democrats, underestimate the will of the American people for short-term volatility for 50 years of safety that we are going to have on the other side of this,” Bessent said.
Hegseth repeatedly slammed the media for framing the war effort as floundering or unfocused, saying Iran’s “air defenses are gone,” its leaders hiding in “underground bunkers,” and its fighters losing morale.
He said Iranian officials in private are admitting “very heavy losses,” and that the U.S. and the world are benefiting from having Trump, whom he called the “ultimate deal maker,” working toward a peace deal.
In the meantime, he said, the U.S. military will “continue negotiating with bombs.”
Doug Burgum highlights American innovation at Great American State Fair
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum joins ‘Fox & Friends’ live from the Great American State Fair in Washington. He emphasizes America’s legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship, discussing the impact of AI and free markets. Burgum also addresses recent vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 22 and the upcoming July 4th opening of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is defending President Donald Trump’s many initiatives to address infrastructure in Washington, D.C., calling it a visible reminder that the country needs to actively press back against decline.
“Nations don’t crumble by fate — they decline by choice,” Burgum told Fox News Digital.
“From rehabilitating and installing historic memorials, statues, and fountains to removing hundreds of instances of graffiti and cleaning up crime on our streets, this administration is proving that American greatness is built through action,” he continued.
Burgum’s reasoning, which came ahead of the United States’ 250th Independence Day anniversary, addresses criticisms of the administration that have surfaced in recent weeks, casting doubt on whether Trump’s many renovation and construction initiatives in Washington, D.C. have been worth their price tag.
WHITE HOUSE SEIZES ON DELAYED OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER OPENING TO CROWN TRUMP ‘BUILDER-IN-CHIEF’
Split of sample tests in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social)
As part of the 250th celebration, Trump has spent $14.7 million to restore the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, allocated $250 million to restore the Kennedy Center and is on track to spend over $400 million on the construction of a ballroom at the White House.
Trump, in a Truth Social update about the reflecting pool, framed the efforts as part of a larger effort.
“We’ve cleaned, renovated and beautified over 45 monuments and memorials, 28 statues and 22 fountains in Washington, D.C. Things are really looking good in our nation’s capital. Add to that the fact that when I became president, crime was rampant. And now Washington, D.C. is one of the safest cities anywhere in the United States,” Trump wrote.
REPUBLICANS QUESTION TRUMP’S ‘PRIVATELY FUNDED’ BALLROOM AFTER REPORT POINTS TO TAXPAYER BURDEN
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reacted during a meeting with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez at the Miraflores Presidential Palace on March 4, 2026, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)
The Department of the Interior, which has overseen many of the improvements, further updated its accomplishments ahead of July 4.
The city has removed 510 instances of graffiti, removed 154 homeless encampments, applied 212 tons of repair materials to roads and parkways, restored 280,000 square feet of roadway paving, rehabilitated 1,301 benches and fixed 1,913 lights.
Burgum said the repairs were emblematic of the administration’s aggressive posture towards addressing problems that had gone ignored in the past. In addition to these major improvements, DOI has restored and cleaned dozens of monuments and statues around DC.
DOI also recently helped transform Meridian Hill Park, which got high praise on social media by DC residents, into a desirable place to visit with a restored fountain that had been under construction for years with very little movement. They also cleaned and restored some of the statues in the park, including the Joan of Arc statue and the James Buchanan Memorial.
FIRST ON FOX: TRUMP ADMIN TRANSFORMS DC HOTSPOT ONCE ROCKED BY GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS IN SYMBOLIC REVERSAL
Washington DC city workers dismantle tents and remove personal belongings during a sweep of a homeless encampment in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, DC, on August 14, 2025. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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“While others accept decline, President Trump and the Department of the Interior are restoring the heart of our nation’s capital,” Burgum said. “The Golden Age of America isn’t just a slogan, it’s being rebuilt, one landmark, one street and one victory at a time.”
Politics
Commentary: Birthright citizenship ruling was a win for democracy — and a warning about erasing history
This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph for the American experiment.
By some, anyway.
Check out MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump surrogates and even elected leaders spouting a kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that once, not so long ago, was considered intolerable in the public sphere.
This has included suggestions that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear they might give birth here, and — no joke — one notable commentator writing that demanding female immigrants be sterilized might be a solution.
President Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said after the ruling that children of immigrants might not be “qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.”
“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for it by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen,” Miller said.
Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, no matter if there’s more gross Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it matters. It is, if read in the right light, a warning for what comes next — a fight to rewrite history to serve political aims.
“The odds were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote about the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood as granting citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil and which was the focus of this case.
Still, she wrote, despite the unlikeliness of post-Civil War America rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always meant to do just that — because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
Signs sit available for protesters to demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court as President Trump arrives to attend oral arguments on April 1 in Washington, DC.
(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)
An alternative interpretation by MAGA world of this amendment and this history was the center of this case.
To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was originally a response to a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott case, that said freed Black slaves could not be U.S. citizens. MAGA world was arguing that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended much more than that — citizenship for ex-slaves and their descendants.
While concurring with the majority of the court, Jackson also wrote her own summary that makes a vital point: Without history that includes the Black experience — as most of the arguments in this case did — we are left bereft of the suffering that has shaped our values and which gives us the empathy required to be a pluralistic society.
Black history — any non-white history, really — is the history of resistance and the road map to recovery from this dark era of hate.
It’s hard to call someone your fellow citizen if you take away their humanity — which is exactly what this case was attempting to do by splitting into factions those who would fight for equality and rewriting history with only the voices that match the current administration’s goals.
It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices bounced around arguments from a myriad of sources outside of their erstwhile adherence to the ideas of originalism, did not call out that erasure more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.
Jackson took that narrow idea that Black people — and the white legislators sympathetic to their cause — had only themselves in mind when crafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it head-on, arguing that if we just look at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger intent of the amendment becomes clear.
“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson pointed out of the MAGA version of events. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
That “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” she wrote, “eventually won the day.”
The 14th Amendment was largely written by Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who took much of the basis of it from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, the most influential Black statesman of the era.
Trumbull then argued in Congress that the amendment was meant to be inclusive — even of so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme racism, especially in California.
One congressman opposed to the measure warned that if it passed, Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California and “will double or treble the population.” At the same time, the Romani would likely continue to “wander in gangs” and “have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers where ever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle,” he warned.
Asked if the amendment would grant citizenship to those two controversial groups of immigrants, Jackson points out that Trumbull gave an unapologetic “undoubtedly,” again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.
The “child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing from an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).
“There is a serious breakdown on the court that reflects the breakdown and echo chambers in America,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and originalism, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers that you liked.”
So the history of the 14th Amendment is right there — equality not just for Black Americans but for immigrant Americans — but it required Jackson to write her own opinion to put it on the court record.
Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant with the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” — words that MAGA claimed were meant to secretly exclude undocumented immigrants.
Brown instead reminded us that outside of those white-only discussions when the amendment was written, it was the activism of Black people — their demand for colorblind equality — that actually shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all babies born within our borders.
Solidarity — the unbreakable strength of American democracy.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write legislation undoing birthright citizenship. Some pundits say that wouldn’t work, but I’m here to say Trump has managed a bunch of stuff that the pundits said wouldn’t work.
More chilling, and direct, were more comments from Miller.
“It’s an abomination,” he said of the ruling.
But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we were dealt a setback, but because of his courage alone, we’re on the precipice as a nation of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and that’s what we have to fight for.”
Miller and his ilk are seeking to rewrite history to justify their vision of the future of America.
Jackson alone in the court offered us both a warning and a path — a reminder that our history holds indisputable facts despite politics, and we erase them at our own peril.
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President Donald Trump marked the eve of America’s 250th anniversary with a sweeping patriotic address at Mount Rushmore on Friday, declaring the United States the “most exceptional nation ever to exist” and vowing that it would “never be a Communist country.”
Speaking beneath the granite likenesses of four of his predecessors — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — Trump touted American exceptionalism as festivities marking the nation’s 250th anniversary ramped up across the country.
“In all the chronicles of the ages, never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one,” Trump told the crowd.
TRUMP KICKS OFF FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND WITH SYMBOLIC SALUTE TO AMERICA’S LEGACY
President Donald Trump delivers remarks at Mount Rushmore on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“At 250 years, America is the oldest republic on earth,” he continued. “We are the freest people on earth. We have the most righteous and enduring Constitution on earth. We are the strongest and most powerful country on earth. And by the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”
Trump praised the nation’s history and argued that no other country had achieved as much as the United States.
“The birth and survival of the American nation under God is, quite simply, the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands, ever,” he said. “No other country has done more good for this world than the United States of America.”
AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDREN
Fireworks explode after President Donald Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Before Trump took the stage, the new Air Force One flew over Mount Rushmore as spectators cheered. After his remarks, the president stayed to watch a fireworks display over the Black Hills.
Trump argued the country was facing what he described as a growing communist movement that sought to undermine America’s “exceptional character” and “alienate us from our history.”
The president said the movement had raised the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”
MAMDANI BLASTS ICE AGENTS, ELON MUSK AND ‘SUPREMACY’ IN AMERICA 250 SPEECH AHEAD OF JULY 4 WEEKEND
President Donald Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Trump described communism as “the greatest threat” facing the United States.
“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen, because communism is the enemy of free people.”
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil,” he continued.
“But we will not let them win,” he added. “They have no chance against us.”
Trump issued a clear directive: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
President Donald Trump speaks beneath Mount Rushmore during a celebration ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
As Americans face those choices, Trump pointed to the nation’s past sacrifices as a guide for its future.
“Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals and lunatics could come in and loot, pillage our nation,” he said.
Trump also highlighted the four presidents carved into the mountain behind him, saying they represented America’s founding ideals.
“They were men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny, and men of truly great intelligence,” he said. “Above all, they were great men of history. Tonight, on the threshold of our 250th year, we stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people. And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants.”
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Trump is scheduled to deliver another speech Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. before a fireworks display celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“We know that this is not an ending,” Trump said. “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”
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