Politics
U.S. and Israeli war in Iran, which Trump says will be ‘short term,’ has global reach
Dozens of civilians, including children, wounded by an Iranian drone strike in Bahrain. France deploying warships to secure shipping commerce in the Strait of Hormuz. Australia taking heat from President Trump over its handling of the Iranian women’s soccer team. Markets across Asia plunging as the price of oil surged.
Lebanon reporting half a million people displaced by fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. State Department telling nonessential staff to get out of Saudi Arabia after attacks there killed workers from India and Bangladesh. Ukrainian anti-drone experts turning their attention from their war with Russia to help intercept Iranian attacks. The defense minister of ever-neutral Switzerland saying his country believes the U.S.-Israeli war violates international law.
In less than two weeks, the Trump administration has instigated a truly global conflict — and with no quick and clear path to resolution, despite Trump insisting to congressional Republicans gathered at his Miami resort Monday that it would be a “short term excursion.”
“Short term! Short term!” Trump said in a bullish speech about the conflict, in which he said “the world respects us right now more than they have ever respected us before.”
“We’re counting down the minutes until they will be gone,” he said of Iran’s remaining leadership, while adding that the U.S. “will not relent” until Iran is “totally and decisively defeated.”
The war is not isolated to Iran, though it has certainly caused devastation there — with more than 1,300 deaths reported and toxic clouds from strikes on fuel depots hovering over Tehran, a city of some 10 million people.
The war’s effects also are not limited to the Middle East, though they are widespread there — as Israel has pushed into Lebanon and Iran has launched a wave of retaliatory strikes on U.S. allies across the Persian Gulf. The fighting has grounded regional air traffic, threatened desalination facilities that provide drinking water to millions and undermined the safe reputation of modern metropolises such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Unlike the recent U.S. incursion into Venezuela to capture and oust President Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. war on Iran has been met with stiff resistance militarily, drawn in a slew of allies, reignited proxy battles, drastically destabilized the oil trade and shifted dynamics between the U.S. and other major powers such as China and Russia.
China, which gets upward of 50% of its crude oil imports through the Strait of Hormuz, has largely stayed out of the conflict, though China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Sunday that the war “should never have happened” and “benefited no one.”
Trump said Monday that the U.S. is less harmed by strait disruptions, and was “really helping China” by securing the strait.
Russia, meanwhile, has emerged the lone winner of energy disruptions in the region, said Robert David English, a UCLA international policy analyst — as the Trump administration considers reducing oil sanctions on Russia to take pressure off of Mideast sources.
Trump said he had a “good talk” with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Iran on Monday. He also said the U.S. was going to suspend sanctions against other countries in order to alleviate strain on oil markets while the Iran conflict persists, but did not provide specifics.
The scope of the war has been dictated in part by Iran, which has historically limited its responses to U.S. strikes but warned after the U.S. bombed its nuclear sites last summer that it would treat any new attacks — large or small — as an act of war, and respond in kind.
Its strikes on U.S. facilities and allies throughout the region reflect that strategy, and are aimed in part at making the war more politically costly for the U.S. by straining global markets and its regional allies, experts said.
However, “you can’t attribute the increasingly global characteristics of the conflict solely to an Iranian strategy, because wars in this region tend to spill over the longer they last, with unintended consequences” including “bringing in all kinds of actors that don’t want to be involved,” said Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology who teaches courses on Iran and Middle East politics at the UCLA International Institute.
That can serve as a deterrent to starting wars in the region, he said, but “also makes them more difficult to wind down.”
The surge in oil prices to nearly $120 a barrel Monday — before a remarkable reversal to below $90 by the time U.S. stocks closed — is one of the furthest-reaching effects of the war, and one that clearly had Trump’s attention.
“Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!” Trump wrote on social media Sunday.
How long prices will remain elevated or volatile is a matter of debate, but Trump’s “short term” projections have been undercut by increasing strikes on oil and gas facilities in the region.
“If you can tolerate oil at more than $200 per barrel, continue this game,” Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Sunday.
Prices at the pump have surged for average Americans, some of whom were attracted to Trump’s candidacy because of his promises to avoid foreign wars and focus on driving down the cost of living for U.S. citizens.
Now, Trump and other administration officials are facing questions about their own role in putting the world at war, and offering various different justifications. They’ve asserted without proof that the U.S. faced an imminent threat of attack from Iran. Trump has repeatedly hinted that his goal was removing the government.
President Trump speaks at the Republican Members Issues Conference on Monday at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla.
(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)
In the meantime, Iran has shown no signs of bowing to Trump, rejecting his calls for “surrender” and for him to have a say in naming their next leader. Iran installed Mojtaba Khamenei after Trump said the hard-liner son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be “unacceptable.”
The choice was hailed by the president of Azerbaijan and the leader of Yemen’s Houthi rebels, among other allies.
To date, seven U.S. service members have been killed in the conflict, according to U.S. officials. Every day, U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for nearly $1 billion in war costs, according to one estimate. Democrats have slammed Trump for both.
“This war is coming from the same President that is building a $400 million ballroom in the White House. The same President that says $100 for a barrel for oil is worth it. The same President that doubled healthcare premiums for millions of Americans. But we have money for another endless war?” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) wrote Monday on X.
Other world leaders focused on the global economic impact.
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which transports about 20% of the world’s oil, has nearly halted, while producers in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates ceased oil operations without open routes for export.
In response, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested French and other allied naval assets could escort oil tankers in the strait, shifting the security burden there from Washington onto Europe, leaving European vessels vulnerable to hostilities and potentially drawing the European Union deeper into the conflict.
Already, they’ve agreed to allow the U.S. to use bases in their territories, though the U.S. and Spain got into a spat after Spain rejected U.S. use of its bases and Trump threatened U.S. trade with the country.
Macron on Monday also threw additional military support behind Cyprus, following a meeting with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis at a Cyprus air base.
France will dispatch an additional 11 warships to operate across the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, Macron said, after an Iranian drone struck a British military base on Cyprus on Monday.
“When Cyprus is attacked, it is Europe that is attacked,” Macron said.
Located just 150 miles from Israel in the eastern Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus has emerged as a strategic — and exposed — nerve center in the U.S. offensive against Iran. It hosts vital British military bases and acts as an intelligence, surveillance, and logistics hub in countering Iranian influence and proxy attacks.
Britain’s Defense Secretary John Healey said Monday that the United Kingdom was conducting air defense to support the UAE, and that Typhoon jets had taken out two drones — one over Jordan and the other headed to Bahrain.
Trump suggested Monday that the U.S. was on the path toward victory, but acknowledged it had not accomplished all of its goals.
“We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” he said — adding the conflict will end “pretty quickly.”
He said Iran had been “very foolish, very stupid” when it attacked its neighbors, hurting its own chances of success in resisting the U.S.
“Their neighbors were largely neutral, or at least weren’t gonna be involved, and they got attacked,” Trump said. “And it had the reverse effect. The neighbors came onto our side, and started attacking them.”
Iran may still attempt to widen the conflict’s economic and geopolitical impact to keep up pressure and push for a ceasefire in its favor, but that could also backfire, said Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations.
“Iran’s becoming increasingly like North Korea in this sense,” he said, “isolating itself further.”
Politics
FBI’s Patel delivers blunt warning to law enforcement attackers: ‘We’re going to put you down’
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FBI Director Kash Patel issued a direct warning to anyone who attacks law enforcement, vowing Saturday that those who “touch a cop” will be tracked down and arrested amid growing concerns over violence against officers.
The comments came while Patel was speaking on SiriusXM Patriot’s “Breitbart News Saturday,” discussing violence against federal officers.
“You have to back the blue,” Patel said. “I say the following to as many officers and Americans that I get in front of: If you touch a cop, we’re going to put you down. And that’s what we’re doing.”
He said the FBI is “going to back our partners,” noting that any criminal who assaults or impedes law enforcement is “going to face the full force of law enforcement.”
FBI Director Kash Patel had a stern warning for anyone who wishes to harm law enforcement professionals. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, File)
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“We’re not saying that you can’t go out there and peacefully protest,” Patel said. “We are simply saying, … you cannot interfere with [an officer in their] lawful execution of [their] lawful duty.
Since the start of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown, the Department of Homeland Security has reported violence against federal agents spiked to a record high.
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The director added police around the country are “so empowered by the fact that we are backing the blue, that they know they have that backing.”
“They also know that if they are physically harmed, they’re just not going to have some perp get away with it,” he said. “We’re going to go find them and we’re going to arrest them.”
Patel’s stance on the issue has remained consistent throughout his time serving in the administration; In June, he posted a similar statement on social media.
Patel said his agency will always “back the blue.” (Stephanie Tacy/NurPhoto via Getty Images, File)
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“Hit a cop, you’re going to jail… doesn’t matter where you came from, how you got here, or what movement speaks to you,” Patel wrote in a June 7 X post. “If the local police force won’t back our men and women on the thin blue line, we @FBI will.”
The FBI did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
SACRAMENTO — As Democratic leaders in California challenge President Trump’s latest effort to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, they also must grapple with a troubling development in the last election.
A significant number of mail-in ballots arrived too late to be counted in the Nov. 4 special election for Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful measure to reconfigure the state’s congressional districts, according to state data.
Ballots came in late at an average rate four times higher than that of the 2024 election, with rural counties seeing some of the biggest increases, according to a Times review.
“Something changed,” said Melvin E. Levey, who heads the Merced County Registrar of Voters. “We don’t like seeing late ballots and if someone has made the effort to vote, we want to count it.”
Merced saw almost a sevenfold increase in late-arriving mail ballots in the November election compared with the year before.
Vote-by-mail ballots are considered late if they are not postmarked on or ahead of election day or do not arrive within seven days of election day.
The issue appears to be linked to the U.S. Postal Service, which last year reduced the number of trips to pick up mail at post offices in mostly rural areas. Election officials warned before Nov. 4 that the Postal Service changes could delay the postmarking of ballots and lead to votes not being counted.
During the Nov. 4 election in California, an average of 8 out of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected by counties because they arrived too late, according to Secretary of State data. In the 2024 general election, which included the presidential race, an average of 2 of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected for being late.
In Kern County, for example, 3,303 mail-in ballots — or 1.95% of returned mail-in ballots — were not counted in the 2025 special election because they arrived too late. In 2024, that number was 332 — or 0.14%. And in Riverside County, 5,831 ballots — or 0.95% of those mailed in — were deemed too late to count, more than double the number of late ballots rejected in 2024.
Postal Service spokesperson Cathy Purcell recommended that voters mail their ballot a week in advance of when it must be received by election officials to ensure it arrives on time.
“You should never be mailing your ballot on election day,” Purcell told The Times.
Before last’s year’s special election, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber issued a similar warning about the delays. Anyone dropping off their ballot at a post office on election day should get it postmarked at the counter, she said.
“We don’t want anyone to just toss it into the mailbox as we have been able to do in the past and have it counted,” she said. “The Postal Service has said that they may not be counted in certain areas.”
California voter data expert Paul Mitchell expressed astonishment about the Postal Service’s guidance.
“We’ve had six, eight years of elections where people were feeling confident about mailing in their ballot,” said Mitchell, vice president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc. “Now the USPS is saying they have to mail it in a week early.”
“That is a dramatic change that can disenfranchise voters who are just following the same pattern that they’ve used in prior elections,” he added.
Democrats have been defending the vote-by-mail system in the face of Republican attacks. Trump recently signed an executive order to impose federal restrictions on mail-in ballots and, without evidence, has long criticized mail-in ballots as a source of fraud and a factor in his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
The Nov. 4 special election on Proposition 50 was the Democrats’ attempt to counter Trump’s push for Republican-led states, most notably Texas, to redraw their electoral maps to keep Democrats from gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms and upending his agenda. The ballot measure overwhelmingly passed.
Nearly 89% of votes in the Nov. 4 election were vote-by-mail ballots, according to Weber’s office. In addition to Proposition 50, tax measures were also on the ballots in some counties.
Postal Service changes
About a month before the Nov. 4 election, Weber and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta held a news conference to encourage California voters to vote early because of service changes at the U.S. Postal Service.
Bonta told reporters that voters living 50 or more miles from six large mail processing centers in urban areas who mailed their ballots on election day would not have those ballots postmarked in time. The centers are in Los Angeles, Bell Gardens, San Diego, Santa Clarita, Richmond and West Sacramento, according to Bonta’s office.
The changes at the U.S. Postal Service are part of a 10-year plan that kicked off several years ago aimed at improving services and reducing costs at the independent federal agency.
In the 17 counties that are mostly or entirely within the 50-mile distance from the mail facilities, the average rate of late ballots doubled in the November 2025 election compared with the election the year before — from 2.5 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 5.6 per 1,000 in 2025.
But in counties that are entirely or mostly outside of the 50-mile radius, the average rate of late ballots quadrupled — from 2 per 1,000 ballots received in 2024 to 9.3 per 1,000 in 2025, state election records show.
Similar complaints about late ballots because of the mail changes have been reported in other states, including in Snohomish County, Wash., according to the New York Times.
The U.S. Postal Services told the Times that there are “any number of factors” that may affect the timeliness of mail.
“The Postal Service has successfully delivered America’s election mail, and we are confident that we will do so again this year,” spokesperson Nikolaj Hagen said. “We rely on long-standing, robust and tested policies and procedures, which have proven successful in the secure and timely delivery of election mail.”
Hagen added that “adjustments to our transportation operations will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed.”
Postmarks are generally applied at those processing facilities, Hagen said, so the postmark date may not reflect the date the mail was collected by a letter carrier, dropped off at a retail location, or placed in a collection box.
While the U.S. Postal Service uses postmarking as an internal tool to track the place and date the mail was accepted, outside entities also use the postmarks for their own purposes, including the Internal Revenue Service, which requires federal tax returns to be mailed by April 15.
Several U.S. senators, including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), sent a letter in January to USPS Postmaster Gen. Dave Steiner warning that changes to postmarking will make it more difficult for people, particularly those in rural areas, to vote by mail and pay tax bills on time.
On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to put new federal controls on voting by mail in states, repeating his long-held but unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots are a source of widespread fraud in U.S. elections.
The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to take control of mail balloting by designing new envelopes with special bar codes that will allow the federal government to ensure that such ballots go out only to eligible voters.
States must follow the USPS process if they plan to use the federal mail system for sending or receiving ballots. They also must submit to the USPS lists of eligible voters in advance of such ballots passing through the mail system.
Separately, the Republican National Committee is challenging a Mississippi law that allows ballots that arrive up to five days after election day to be accepted and counted. The case was argued before the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court in March.
Times staff reporter Kevin Rector contributed to this report.
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President Donald Trump delivered a Good Friday message from the Resolute Desk celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ while declaring that religion is experiencing a “resurgence” across the United States in his second term.
“As I have often said, to be a great nation, you must have religion, and you must have God,” Trump said.
The president framed his message with faith as a central pillar of American strength, pointing to what he described as a broader cultural shift toward religion.
The video, shared via Truth Social on Good Friday, honored the Christian faith tradition and what he claims is a renewal of religion in the United States.
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President Donald Trump bows his head in prayer during the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., Feb. 5, 2026. (Saul Loeb/AFP)
President Trump has often recalled his Presbyterian upbringing, attending Sunday school. He has previously credited his faith to his devout Scottish mother and a “very strong” but “great-hearted” father in remarks at the 2024 National Faith Summit.
“In churches across the nation on Sunday, the pews will be fuller, younger and more faithful than they have at any time in many, many years,” Trump said. “Religion is growing again in our country for the first time in decades.“
The president has invited prayer and faith back into the public square with both an America 250 prayer initiative and the establishment of the White House Faith Office early in his second term.
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President Trump speaks during the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., Feb. 5, 2026. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump said he’s “proud to join with Christians” during Holy Week in his address.
“This Holy Week, I’m proud to join with Christians across the country and around the world to celebrate the most glorious miracle in all of time — the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” Trump said.
“In his life, Christ displayed true humility. In His death, He modeled true love.”
The president also invoked scripture in his address, quoting John 3:16.
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President Donald Trump calls people to the podium to stand with him during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House May 1, 2025, in Washington. (Alex Brandon/AP)
“As it says in Gospel of John, for God so loved the world that He gave His only son, for whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life,” Trump said.
President Trump’s outspoken approach to the Christian holiday serves as a foil to his predecessor. Former President Joe Biden most recently shared a brief three-paragraph statement during his tenure to celebrate the season in 2024.
Trump has been more candid in his approach to his faith since he survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.
“I believe that my life was saved that day in Butler for a very good reason,” he declared during his address to a joint session of Congress in 2025. “I was saved by God to make America great again. I believe that.”
The president ended his remarks by wishing everyone a blessed holiday.
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“Happy Easter to all. May God bless you. May God bless the United States of America,” Trump concluded.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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