Manouchehr Mottaki, a former Iranian foreign minister who remains a prominent figure in Iran's political establishment, praised a fatwa calling for the killing of President Donald Trump in a Persian-language television interview.
He described the religious ruling targeting both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as "a brave and significant act."
Fox News reported that his daughter, Zahra Assadi Nazari, lives in New York City. Her husband, Nasser Assadi Nazari, is an Iranian diplomat serving at the permanent mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, listed as a third counselor.
The family of a man publicly celebrating a death warrant against the sitting U.S. president enjoys the protections, comforts, and freedoms of the very country he wants to see its leader murdered.
Mottaki served as Iran's foreign minister from 2005 to 2010 under then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the interview, reviewed by Fox News Digital, he said Iran's Supreme Leader had determined that Trump was a criminal and suggested Iran's judiciary should act on that determination.
This is not some fringe cleric ranting from a basement mosque. This is a former cabinet-level official in the Iranian government, a man who represented the Islamic Republic on the world stage for five years, openly endorsing the assassination of a sitting American president.
And his son-in-law walks into the United Nations building in Manhattan every day.
Fox News Digital contacted Iran's mission to the United Nations for comment. The mission declined. Fox News Digital also requested comment from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. No response was received by the time of publication.
There is a pattern here that deserves attention. Iran's ruling class despises America in public and enjoys it in private. The regime's officials and their families send their children to Western universities, park their relatives in Western cities, and access Western institutions, all while calling for the destruction of the West.
This is not the first time the contradiction has surfaced. In January, Emory University dismissed Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of Iranian official Ali Larijani, from a teaching position at the university's medical school after protests over her employment.
The children of a theocratic regime that executes dissidents and oppresses women were, until very recently, teaching at American medical schools and living in American cities without a whisper of scrutiny.
The question is not complicated. If an official of a hostile foreign government praises a religious edict calling for the murder of the American president, should his daughter and her diplomat husband continue to enjoy residency in America's largest city?
The fact that the question even needs to be asked tells you how deeply unserious the international diplomatic framework has become.
The broader tension between the U.S. and Iran spilled into public view at the United Nations Security Council. Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Saeid Iravani, sparred with U.S. envoy Mike Waltz during a session on February 28, 2026. Iravani offered this:
"I have one word only: I advise the representative of the United States to be polite."
Waltz did not take the bait. He did something better. He named the regime for what it is:
"Frankly, I'm not going to dignify this with another response, especially as this representative sits here in this body representing a regime that has killed tens of thousands of its own people and imprisoned many more simply for wanting freedom from your tyranny."
That is the only appropriate response to a government that lectures others on politeness while endorsing assassination fatwas. Iran's ambassador wants civility at the Security Council table while his country's former foreign minister celebrates a death warrant against the man sitting across from him. The audacity is almost impressive.
The United Nations has long served as a staging ground for regimes that would not survive five minutes under the principles the institution claims to uphold.
Iran sends diplomats to New York, houses their families in American neighborhoods, and grants them access to American life. In return, its political establishment openly calls for the killing of the American president.
Diplomatic norms exist for a reason. But those norms were designed for nations operating in something resembling good faith.
When a country's former foreign minister praises a fatwa against your head of state, and that man's daughter lives under the protection of your laws and your police, the arrangement has moved well past diplomacy into something closer to exploitation.
The Iranian regime understands leverage. It understands symbolism. And it understands that the West's commitment to procedural norms can be weaponized against it. Every day that Mottaki's family lives comfortably in New York while he cheers for Trump's assassination is a day the regime wins a small, quiet victory.
Iran asked America to be polite. America should ask Iran why its officials' families keep choosing to live here.
President Trump told POLITICO in a phone interview Thursday that the United States would help shape who leads Iran next, that Cuba's communist government is on the verge of collapse, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy needs to stop being an obstacle to peace. He covered the full map in a single conversation, from the decimation of Iran's military to the squeeze on Havana to the firing of Anthropic.
The breadth was striking. So was the confidence.
Trump made clear that the U.S. military campaign against Iran has been devastating and precise. He described the Islamic Republic's defenses as functionally destroyed.
"They have no navy. They have no air force. They have no detection of air. It's all wiped out. Their radar is all wiped out. Their military is decimated."
What remains, Trump acknowledged, is resolve. "All they have is guts." But guts don't intercept cruise missiles, and they don't rebuild a shattered command structure.
The more consequential revelation was what came after. Trump said the United States would actively work to influence Iran's future leadership, framing it not as regime change imposed at gunpoint but as collaborative steering toward a stable, non-nuclear outcome.
"We'll work with the people and the regime to make sure that somebody gets there that can nicely build Iran but without nuclear weapons."
He referenced the succession question following the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, noting that Khamenei's son is now in contention for supreme leader. Trump was blunt about the assessment circulating among Iranian power brokers: "The reason the father wouldn't give it to the son is they say he's incompetent."
Trump's stated goal is to "work with them to help them make the proper choice," and his reasoning is strategic, not ideological. Without the right outcome, he warned, the same problem returns.
"I'm going to have a big impact, or they're not going to have any settlement, because we're not going to have to go do this again."
The alternative, he said plainly, is "having to do this again in another 10 years." That framing matters. For decades, American foreign policy in the Middle East has cycled between intervention and retreat, never resolving the underlying threat. Trump is signaling that this time, the endgame is part of the plan.
He described the current operations as "surgical" and backed up the posture with scale: "We have unlimited supply of weapons, unlimited. We have thousands, thousands, of them."
Trump turned his attention to the Western Hemisphere with equal directness. Cuba, he predicted, is finished.
"Cuba's going to fall, too."
The instability intensifies following the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which severed Havana's lifeline from Caracas. Trump described the pressure campaign in concrete terms: the U.S. cut off all oil, all money, and everything flowing from Venezuela to Cuba, "which was the sole source."
And the result? "They want to make a deal."
Trump said the United States is actively talking to Cuba's communist leadership. He framed the moment with a question that doubles as its own answer: "How long have you been hearing about Cuba, Cuba, Cuba, for 50 years?"
He pointed to Venezuela as proof of concept. "Venezuela is doing fantastically," he said, praising Delcy Rodríguez by name: "She is doing a fantastic job. The relationship with them is great." The broader point is that pressure works. Cut off the money, isolate the regime, and negotiations follow. Cuba, in Trump's telling, is the next domino.
"And that's one of the small ones for me," he added. The line lands because it's probably true. Relative to Iran, Cuba is a smaller strategic footprint. But for the millions who have suffered under six decades of communist rule on that island, it is anything but small.
Trump reserved his sharpest words for Zelenskyy, expressing open frustration with the Ukrainian president's posture on negotiations.
"Zelenskyy has to get on the ball, and he has to get a deal done."
Trump said he believes Putin is ready to negotiate an end to the war. That makes Zelenskyy's resistance, in Trump's view, not just strategically unwise but inexplicable.
"It's unthinkable that he's the obstacle."
The message to Kyiv was delivered without a diplomatic cushion: "You don't have the cards. Now he's got even fewer cards." The arithmetic is cold but honest. Ukraine's leverage has diminished, not grown, as the war has ground on. Continuing to reject negotiations from a weakening position is not courage. It is a miscalculation.
For years, Washington's bipartisan establishment treated any questioning of Ukraine's strategy as tantamount to supporting Russia. That framing was always dishonest. Wanting a war to end on realistic terms is not capitulation. It is the responsibility of any leader whose people are dying.
Trump also confirmed he had moved against the AI company Anthropic, saying flatly, "Well, I fired Anthropic. Anthropic is in trouble because I fired them like dogs, because they shouldn't have done that." He offered no further detail on the mechanism, but the message was unmistakable. There are consequences for crossing this administration.
He praised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's performance and tied it to a broader point about military readiness. "You see how good Pete's doing, and you see how good the military," Trump said. "I built the military in my first term, and I'm using it in my second term."
That single line captures the strategic logic of the moment. The investments in hardware and capability made during the first administration are now being deployed, not theoretically, but operationally, across multiple theaters. The world is watching, and the results are visible.
The interview covered Iran, Cuba, Ukraine, Venezuela, AI, and the U.S. military. On the surface, these are disparate topics. Beneath the surface, a single principle runs through every one of them: leverage applied, not just accumulated.
For decades, American power sat on the shelf. Sanctions were imposed but never enforced to their conclusion. Military assets were funded but deployed tentatively. Diplomatic engagement happened without credible consequences for walking away. The result was a world that took American threats as suggestions.
What Trump described Thursday is the opposite model:
Whether each of these moves produces the desired outcome remains to be seen. But the pattern is unmistakable, and so is the message it sends to every government, company, and leader calculating whether this administration means what it says.
It does.
Sri Lanka has assumed control of the Iranian fleet supply ship IRIS Bushehr after its captain handed the vessel over to Sri Lankan authorities in the country's territorial waters. The 1970s-era oiler will be towed to the historic port of Trincomalee and interned for the duration of hostilities, marking the first time a neutral nation has interned a belligerent warship since the Second World War.
Sri Lankan authorities sent a craft to receive the ship, removed 208 officers and men according to local media, and began preparations to relocate the vessel away from Colombo, the country's primary commercial port. The internment follows by a day the destruction of the Iranian frigate IRIS DENA by the United States Navy in international waters to the south of Sri Lanka, a sinking that the U.S. Department of War documented with published periscope footage.
That sinking itself was a historic marker: the first officially acknowledged such event anywhere since 1982.
Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake framed his government's decision as a humanitarian measure wrapped in diplomatic neutrality, according to Breitbart. He said his government had selected Trincomalee to avoid disrupting maritime traffic near Colombo, and offered a statement clearly designed for an international audience:
"We are not taking sides in this conflict, but while maintaining our neutrality we are taking action to save lives."
It's a carefully worded position, and one that happens to serve Sri Lanka's interests perfectly. Colombo is a vital commercial hub. Parking a belligerent warship there would invite exactly the kind of attention a small island nation cannot afford. Trincomalee, with its deep natural harbor and military history stretching back to the British Empire, is the obvious choice for keeping a problem vessel out of the way.
But Dissanayake's neutrality isn't just a posture. It may have been the only option that kept Sri Lanka out of the crossfire, literally.
The internment carries weight far beyond symbolism. Under established principles of naval warfare, a belligerent vessel is entitled to spend 24 hours in the waters of a neutral country without fear of attack. After that window closes, the neutral state faces a binary choice: intern the vessel or risk the consequences of failing to enforce its own neutrality.
The International Red Cross has articulated the stakes clearly:
"It is generally accepted that if belligerent forces enter neutral territory and the neutral authority is unable or unwilling to expel or intern them, the adverse party is entitled to undertake their hot pursuit and attack them there. It may even seek compensation from the neutral State for this breach of neutrality."
In plain terms, had Sri Lanka not interned the IRIS Bushehr within 24 hours, the United States would have been within its rights to pursue and destroy the ship even inside Sri Lankan territorial waters or harbors. The Iranian captain, watching what had just happened to the IRIS DENA in open water a day earlier, evidently did the math.
Neither Sri Lanka nor Iran has yet officially confirmed that the ship was surrendered by her captain. But the facts on the ground speak clearly enough. The crew is ashore. The ship is in Sri Lankan hands. And the vessel is headed to Trincomalee, not back to sea.
The timing of the Bushehr's surrender cannot be separated from what happened to the DENA. When the U.S. Navy destroyed an Iranian frigate in international waters south of Sri Lanka, and the Department of War released the periscope footage for the world to see, the message was not subtle. It was not meant to be.
Publishing that footage was a deliberate choice. It communicated to every Iranian naval commander in the region that American forces were present, capable, and willing to act. For the captain of the Bushehr, a 1970s-era oiler with no realistic capacity to survive an engagement, the calculus was straightforward. Fight and die, flee and likely die, or seek the protection of a neutral port.
He chose the port.
Something is clarifying about watching the old rules of naval warfare reassert themselves in real time. For decades, international law governing belligerent vessels in neutral waters has been a subject for academics and war college seminars. The last time a neutral nation interned a warship under these principles, the world was fighting fascism.
Now those dusty legal frameworks are operational again, and they are functioning exactly as designed. A belligerent vessel entered neutral territory. The neutral state acted within the 24-hour window. The crew was removed. The ship was secured. The adverse belligerent did not need to violate neutral sovereignty. Every party followed the script that international law wrote for precisely this scenario.
That the system worked is noteworthy. That it needed to work at all tells you something about the current state of the world.
The IRIS Bushehr had visited Colombo on a formal port call as recently as February 2024, when she arrived under the command of Captain Mahdi Balvardi with a crew of 270. That visit was diplomatic theater, a flag-showing exercise meant to project Iranian naval reach into the Indian Ocean.
The contrast between that visit and this one could not be sharper. In 2024, the Bushehr sailed into Colombo under her own power for a formal reception. Now she sits stripped of her crew, awaiting a tow to internment, her complement reduced from 270 to 208 officers and men. Whatever Iran intended its Indian Ocean presence to communicate, the message received by the world this week is rather different.
One Iranian warship is on the ocean floor with American periscope footage documenting its final moments. Another is interned in a foreign port, surrendered by its own captain. The Iranian navy's ability to project power beyond its immediate waters has been publicly, decisively diminished.
The foreign policy establishment spent years insisting that confrontation with Iran would destabilize the region, that military strength would provoke escalation spirals, and that diplomacy without teeth was the only responsible path. What this week demonstrated is simpler and older than any think tank white paper: credible force produces surrender. Weakness produces adventurism.
The captain of the IRIS Bushehr did not surrender because someone convened a multilateral dialogue. He surrendered because the ship next to him was at the bottom of the ocean.
Sri Lanka's neutrality was maintained because it acted decisively within the legal framework. The United States' position held because it backed its demands with demonstrated capability. Iran's position collapsed because bluster without capability is just noise.
Sometimes the old rules work because they were built on truths that don't change.
Kurdish Iranian dissident groups stationed in northern Iraq say they are moving fighters toward the Iranian border and preparing for potential military operations inside Iran, with Kurdish officials telling the Associated Press that the United States has asked Iraqi Kurdish leaders to support the effort.
Khalil Nadiri, an official with the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), said Wednesday that some PAK forces had relocated to areas near the Iranian border in Sulaymaniyah province and were waiting on standby. An official with Komala, another Kurdish opposition group, said its forces could be ready to cross the border within a week to 10 days. The groups are believed to have thousands of trained fighters between them.
The preparations come after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, triggering a new phase of conflict in the Middle East.
Three Iraqi Kurdish officials told the AP that a phone call took place Sunday night between President Trump and two of the most powerful figures in Iraqi Kurdistan: Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Bafel Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. One of the officials said Trump asked the Iraqi Kurds to militarily support Iranian Kurdish groups in operations inside Iran and to open the border, according to Newsmax.
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan confirmed the call in a statement, saying Trump "provided clarification and vision regarding U.S. objectives in the war." The PUK also added that it "believes that the best solution is a return to the negotiating table."
Spokespeople for Barzani declined to comment.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered a more limited characterization of the conversation. Asked about the call and reports that Trump had sought military support for Iranian Kurdish groups, Leavitt said:
"He did speak to Kurdish leaders with respect to our base that we have in northern Iraq."
She denied that Trump had agreed to a specific plan. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, asked Wednesday about reports that the administration was considering arming Iranian Kurdish groups, was similarly careful:
"None of our objectives are premised on the support or the arming of any particular force. So, what other entities may be doing, we're aware of, but our objectives aren't centered on that."
Read those statements closely. Neither is a denial that contact occurred. Neither rules out coordination. What they rule out is dependency. The U.S. is not building its Iran strategy around Kurdish fighters, but it is not discouraging them either.
The Kurdish region has already absorbed a string of drone and missile attacks by Iran and allied Iraqi militias in recent days, targeting U.S. military bases, the U.S. Consulate in Irbil, and the Kurdish groups' own positions. Electricity cuts followed after a key gas field halted operations. The region is feeling the pressure from multiple directions.
Iran, predictably, wants the threat neutralized before it materializes. Iraq's National Security Adviser Qassim al-Araji said in a post on X that Ali Bagheri, deputy secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, had requested:
"that Iraq take the necessary measures to prevent any opposition groups from infiltrating the border between the two countries."
Al-Araji responded by pledging Iraq's commitment to "preventing any groups from infiltrating or crossing the Iranian border or carrying out terrorist acts from Iraqi territory," adding that security reinforcements had been sent to the border. Baghdad is caught between its neighbor to the east and the superpower that still maintains forces on its soil. That is not a comfortable position, and al-Araji's language reflects the tightrope.
The Kurdish opposition to Iran's regime is not new. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's new theocracy battled Kurdish insurgents in fighting that killed thousands over several months. Under the Shah before that, Kurds were marginalized, repressed, and periodically in revolt. The grievances run deep and predate the current crisis by decades.
In 2023, Iraq reached an agreement with Iran to disarm the Kurdish dissident groups and move them from bases near the border into camps designated by Baghdad. The bases were shut down. Movement within Iraq was restricted. But the groups did not give up their weapons. That detail matters enormously now. The infrastructure was dismantled; the fighting capacity was not.
Reza Pahlavi, the former shah's son, has accused the Kurds of being separatists aiming to carve up Iran. That framing is convenient for anyone who wants to delegitimize an armed opposition without engaging with why that opposition exists in the first place.
The strategic logic here is straightforward. Iran is a regime that rules by coercion, and coercive regimes are uniquely vulnerable to internal pressure. Kurdish fighters with local knowledge, existing grievances, and a willingness to operate inside Iranian territory represent exactly the kind of asymmetric challenge that Tehran has spent years trying to suppress through diplomatic agreements with Baghdad.
Those agreements held when the broader region was relatively stable. That stability evaporated Saturday.
Much of the reporting relies on anonymous Kurdish officials, and the White House is clearly managing the public narrative with precision. That is not unusual when military and intelligence equities are in play. What is clear from the public record is that:
The Kurdish groups themselves are not waiting for permission slips. They have fighters, they have weapons they were supposed to have surrendered, and they have generations of reasons to act. Whether Washington is formally coordinating with them or simply not standing in their way, the effect on Tehran's calculations is the same.
Iran now faces the prospect of fighting on multiple fronts: against the U.S. and Israeli military campaign from the air, and against an indigenous armed opposition crossing its western border. That is precisely the kind of strategic squeeze that changes a regime's willingness to negotiate.
The PUK's statement said the best solution is a return to the negotiating table. Perhaps. But negotiating tables tend to appear only after the alternative becomes unbearable.
As American missiles struck Iranian targets and ended the 86-year-old theocratic dictator Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took to X with a two-word foreign policy treatise: "No new wars."
It did not go well for him.
The 2024 vice presidential nominee joined the chorus of Democrats criticizing the Trump administration's strikes on Iran, and the internet responded with the kind of bipartisan contempt rarely seen in American politics. Walz managed to unite the left and the right, not behind a cause, but against himself.
The responses came fast and from every direction, Fox News noted. Aviva Klompas, whose bio includes time at the Israeli mission to the United Nations, dismantled the premise entirely:
"Iran started this war 47 years ago when they took Americans hostage. Honestly, can people crack open a book before posting nonsense?"
Comedian Michael Rapaport slammed Walz by retweeting Klompas's response and then offered his own assessment of Khamenei's demise:
"I'm glad that old bag of s--- and his entire regime are gone."
Rapaport, who has been vocal against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, went on to take issue with critics of the Iranian strikes more broadly. He condemned those who remained silent as Khamenei oversaw mass murders of tens of thousands of dissidents in recent months. On Monday, he added further commentary on the dictator's death in characteristically colorful fashion.
Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a top pro-Israel voice in Congress, skipped the geopolitics entirely and went straight for the jugular: "Will this affect your Somali kickbacks?"
Conservative videographer Cam Higby, who had tweeted videos of his stringer-type visits to Minneapolis unrest, posed a different question: "Didn't you just try to start a war with Trump a month ago?"
That last one lands harder than it might seem.
Tim Walz has spent the past year as one of the most visible state leaders and Trump critics in the country. He has repeatedly condemned the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement efforts in his state. He has pushed the idea that President Donald Trump is a monarch, posting "No kings" alongside his opposition. He has positioned himself as the conscience of the resistance.
And yet the man who wants to be the moral authority on executive overreach once stood with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and declared:
"Minnesota stands with the people of Ukraine as they fight to defend freedom and democracy."
So military engagement abroad is noble when it involves a cause Walz approves of, but a strike against a regime that took American hostages, sponsored terrorism across the Middle East, and brutalized its own people is somehow a bridge too far. The principle isn't "no new wars." The principle is "no wars that help Trump."
This is the feedback loop that defines so much of the modern left. Opposition to the current administration becomes the only consistent value. Everything else, including coherence, is negotiable.
Fine's jab about "Somali kickbacks" wasn't random. Minnesota has wrestled with a Somali-linked childcare fraud problem that metastasized to other sectors, and Walz has faced scrutiny over his handling of it. The governor who positions himself as a guardian of democratic norms has presided over a state where fraud flourished under lax oversight. That context doesn't disappear because he posted two words about Iran.
Late Monday, reports surfaced that Khamenei's wife, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, succumbed to her injuries from the missile strike that killed her husband. The regime that terrorized its own citizens, hanged dissidents from cranes, and funded proxy wars across the region has been decapitated.
The appropriate response from an American governor is not complicated. You don't have to celebrate. You don't have to wave a flag. But "No new wars" in response to the elimination of one of the world's most brutal theocrats tells you everything about where Walz's priorities sit. Not with the Iranian women beaten for showing their hair. Not with the hostages taken 47 years ago. Not with the dissidents who disappeared into regime prisons.
With the narrative. Always with the narrative.
Walz wanted to score a point against the administration. Instead, he reminded everyone, left and right alike, why voters didn't send him to the White House.
Actor Michael Rapaport unloaded on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Sunday, exposing a glaring double standard: both Democrats rushed to condemn President Trump's military strikes against Iran's mullahs but had nothing to say while the regime spent weeks slaughtering its own people.
Rapaport's message to Ocasio-Cortez was blunt:
"You said 0.0 during the last few weeks as 35k civilians were slaughtered raped and arrested in Iran. Resign."
He saved similar treatment for Mamdani, writing on X:
"You said 0.0 during the last few weeks as 35k plus civilians were slaughtered raped and arrested in Iran. Shovel Snow & get me my free shit."
The backdrop is straightforward. The president authorized a series of surprise attacks on Iran's mullahs on Saturday. Democratic officials all across the country immediately rose to defend the brutal Iranian regime. Ocasio-Cortez ripped Trump and accused him of refusing to use "diplomacy" in Iran, calling him a "president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions." Mamdani blasted Trump for what he called a "catastrophic" and "illegal" war on Iran.
None of them had a word to say as the mullahs spent the last month killing tens of thousands of civilians protesting for democracy.
Ocasio-Cortez's invocation of "diplomacy" deserves particular scrutiny, as Breitbart points out. Diplomacy with Iran has been failing since 1979. Nearly half a century of engagement, negotiation, frameworks, and deals, and the theocratic regime still brutalizes its own citizens, funds terrorism across the Middle East, and inches toward nuclear capability.
At what point does the call for "diplomacy" stop being a policy position and start being a reflexive tic? When Iranian protesters are being slaughtered in the streets, and your first instinct is to criticize the American president for acting against the regime doing the slaughtering, you have revealed something about your priorities. It isn't flattering.
The pattern is familiar. Authoritarian regimes commit atrocities. The American left says nothing. The moment a Republican president takes action, they discover their voice. The outrage is never directed at the people pulling triggers in Tehran. It's directed at the Oval Office.
Mamdani calling military action against Iran "illegal" and "catastrophic" is rich coming from a mayor whose own policy instincts have drawn fire from across the political spectrum. His concern for legality appears highly selective. Tens of thousands of Iranian civilians arrested, beaten, and killed by their own government didn't trigger a single statement about illegality. But is American military action against the regime responsible? Catastrophic. Illegal. Must be condemned immediately.
This is the tell. For a certain kind of progressive politician, American power is always the problem. Never the dictatorship. Never theocracy. Never the regime that hangs dissidents from cranes. The villain is always Washington.
Rapaport is not a conservative commentator. He's a Hollywood actor who has been willing to break with progressive orthodoxy when the facts demand it. That's precisely what makes his criticism effective. He isn't operating from a partisan playbook. He's pointing out something obvious that most people in his industry would rather ignore.
The question he posed is simple, and neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Mamdani has answered it: Where were you during the last few weeks?
Not during the strikes. During the slaughter. When Iranian civilians, many of them young, many of them women, were being killed for demanding basic democratic rights, where was the outrage? Where were the press conferences? Where were the posts on X?
Silence. Total silence. Then, the moment Trump acts against the regime responsible, the keyboards start clacking.
This is the core rot in progressive foreign policy thinking. Moral urgency is activated only when it can be aimed at domestic political opponents. Iranian civilians dying in the streets? Not useful. Can't be pinned on a Republican. File it away. But American military action? Now we're in business. Now we can fundraise. Now we can clip quotes for social media.
It isn't principled opposition. Its performance. And increasingly, ordinary Americans can see the difference.
Rapaport told them both what millions of people were already thinking. Neither has offered a convincing answer. Neither is likely to. When your silence is the argument against you, there's not much left to say.
Three U.S. service members are dead, and five more are seriously wounded following combat operations inside Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. Central Command confirmed Sunday.
The joint U.S.-Israeli military operation launched Saturday against the Islamist regime in Tehran, representing one of the largest regional concentrations of American military firepower in a generation. The cost of that operation is now measured in American blood.
CENTCOM provided minimal detail about the circumstances surrounding the deaths, noting only that major combat operations continue and the response effort remains ongoing. Several additional service members sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions and are in the process of returning to duty.
The facts are spare, and deliberately so. CENTCOM explained its reasoning plainly, according to Breitbart:
"The situation is fluid, so out of respect for the families, we will withhold additional information, including the identities of our fallen warriors, until 24 hours after next of kin have been notified."
That restraint is appropriate. Somewhere in the United States right now, families are receiving the worst news of their lives, or they are about to. The names will come in time. What matters first is that three Americans went to war and did not come home.
No unit designations have been released. No specific engagement details have been disclosed. The operational picture remains fluid, which is military language for: this is still happening.
It is easy, in the scroll of breaking news alerts and political commentary, to lose sight of what a combat death actually means. It means a folded flag. It means a knock on the door. It might mean children who will grow up learning about a parent from photographs and secondhand stories.
Three service members volunteered for this. They raised their right hands, swore an oath, trained for years, deployed to one of the most dangerous theaters on earth, and gave everything. Five more are seriously wounded, facing recoveries that may reshape the rest of their lives. Others are already rotating back to duty with shrapnel wounds and concussions, because the mission continues and someone has to carry it forward.
This is the reality of military force. It is not an abstraction debated on cable news panels. It is not a hashtag. It is young men and women absorbing the violence that their country decided was necessary.
The United States launched its major military operation alongside Israeli forces against the Iranian regime on Saturday. Details about the scope, objectives, and progress of Operation Epic Fury remain tightly held, as they should be during active combat.
What is publicly known is that this represents a decisive escalation, the kind of military commitment that does not happen without serious deliberation at the highest levels of government and military command. The concentration of American firepower in the region has been described as generational in scale.
For years, Iran's regime has operated as the central banker of Middle Eastern terrorism, funding proxies, arming militias, and destabilizing every country within reach. Whatever triggered the timing of this operation, the underlying cause has been building for decades. The regime in Tehran has spent a generation testing American resolve. Now it has an answer.
CENTCOM's statement that "major combat operations continue" tells us the most important thing: this is not over. More casualty reports may follow. The fog of war is thick, and the information environment will be unreliable for days, perhaps longer.
The appropriate response from the American public is not to politicize these deaths before the families have even been notified. It is to recognize that the men and women conducting this operation are doing so at extraordinary personal risk, and that three of them have already paid the ultimate price.
There will be time for analysis of strategy, for debate about objectives, and for assessment of outcomes. That time is not now. Now is for the fallen, the wounded, and the families bracing for a world that just changed forever.
Three warriors went forward. They did not come back. Honor them first. Everything else can wait.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro blasted President Donald Trump's decision to strike Iran early Saturday, accusing the administration of lacking a "clear plan" for the military campaign. In nearly the same breath, Shapiro acknowledged that the Iranian regime is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and endorsed the idea of a fundamentally different government in Tehran.
The contradiction writes itself.
Shapiro, a Democrat considered a potential 2028 presidential contender, issued a statement that tried to thread a needle familiar to his party: oppose the Republican president's actions while carefully avoiding any appearance of sympathy for America's enemies. The result was a statement that criticized the mission and then validated its underlying logic.
Shapiro's first move was to question the urgency and strategy behind the strikes:
"In going to war with Iran, the President has not adequately explained why this war is urgent now, what this military campaign may look like, or what the strategic objective is."
He followed that with a broader indictment of the administration's communication:
"President Trump and his Administration have not demonstrated to the American people that we have a clear plan with this mission."
Standard opposition rhetoric. A governor from the party out of power demands more transparency. That much is predictable. What came next was not.
"Make no mistake, the Iranian regime represses its own people and is the leading state sponsor of terrorism around the world."
Shapiro then went further, referencing the tens of thousands of Iranians who have died in recent weeks standing up against the regime's brutality, and openly calling for a government in Tehran that "gives voice to these hopes, respects their rights, and pursues their interests peacefully."
So the regime is monstrous. It murders its own citizens. It sponsors terrorism globally. Its people are dying in the streets for freedom. But the American president shouldn't act against it without first filing a more detailed briefing with Josh Shapiro.
This is what positioning looks like when a politician knows his base hates Trump, but his general-election audience might not hate the mission. Shapiro can't afford to be seen defending the Iranian regime. No serious American politician can. But he also can't afford to give Trump credit for confronting it.
The result is a statement designed to be quoted selectively. Progressives get the "no clear plan" sound bite. Moderates and hawkish Democrats get the "leading state sponsor of terrorism" line. Everyone gets to hear what they want. Nobody has to reconcile the two halves.
This is a familiar pattern from Democrats on national security. They rarely argue that the enemy doesn't deserve what's coming. They argue about process, planning, and communication. The effect is to position themselves as the responsible adults who would have done the same thing, just better, with more PowerPoint slides and interagency memos.
It's worth noting what Shapiro did not say. He did not call for a ceasefire. He did not demand withdrawal. He did not suggest diplomacy with the current regime as a viable path. He effectively endorsed the end goal of regime change while objecting to the means of getting there. For a potential 2028 candidate, that's not a principle. That's optionality, as Washington Examiner reports.
The broader picture makes Shapiro's quibbling feel especially small. Israeli strikes have killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with some of his key advisers and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The regime has suffered massive blows to its leadership, with no successor readily apparent. Khamenei's death initiates a succession process in a government already reeling from internal unrest.
President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been urging the Iranian people to overthrow their theocratic government entirely. This isn't an ambiguous strategic objective. It's about as clearly stated as foreign policy gets.
Shapiro himself rebuked the regime for its violent crackdown on protesters in January. He acknowledged that tens of thousands of Iranians have died fighting for their own freedom. The regime he describes is one that:
If that's the regime, and Shapiro agrees it is, then what exactly is the alternative to force? The governor doesn't say. He simply insists that whatever is being done should have been explained to him more thoroughly first.
Democrats have spent years arguing that Iran is a destabilizing force in the Middle East. They've sanctioned it, condemned it, and negotiated with it. None of those approaches removed the theocratic government that Shapiro himself now says the Iranian people deserve to be free of.
When action finally arrives, the objection isn't to the goal. It's to the man pursuing it. That's not a foreign policy position. That's partisanship wearing a lanyard.
Shapiro also made sure to mention U.S. service members in the region, expressing concern for their safety. That concern is legitimate and shared across the political spectrum. But wrapping it into a statement whose primary purpose is to criticize the commander-in-chief during an active military operation doesn't strengthen the troops. It strengthens the talking point.
The Iranian regime's leadership structure is in chaos. The succession question looms over a government that was already losing its grip on a population willing to die for change. Trump and Netanyahu have made their position unambiguous: the theocratic regime should fall.
Shapiro agrees the regime is evil. He agrees that the people deserve better. He agrees that the government sponsors terrorism. He just wants it on the record that he asked for a clearer plan before any of it happened.
If Iran emerges from this with a government that stops executing protesters and funding terror, nobody will remember the governor's request for a more detailed briefing. If it doesn't, his statement won't have contributed anything toward a better outcome either.
Some moments demand clarity. Shapiro chose footnotes.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) unloaded on both Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Democratic lawmakers Saturday over their push to force a war powers vote in the wake of joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, arguing they fundamentally misunderstand the law they claim to be defending.
The rebuke came as members of Congress from both parties scrambled to respond to Operation Epic Fury, which began at 1:15 a.m. ET and targeted Iranian military infrastructure. Iran's Red Crescent told Iranian state TV the strikes killed over 200 people and injured almost 750, hitting 24 out of Iran's 31 provinces. Iran retaliated with drone and missile strikes on U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait, along with several attacks on Israel.
In the middle of all that, the loudest voices on Capitol Hill weren't focused on the threat. They were focused on procedure.
Lawler, writing on X, laid out the War Powers Act with the kind of clarity that apparently eluded his colleagues. The president must notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops or carrying out an attack. He must then withdraw within 60 to 90 days unless Congress declares war. Those are the actual requirements.
"In this instance, Congress was notified in advance and briefed before the strike on Iran. A full classified briefing will be forthcoming."
In other words, the White House didn't just meet the legal threshold. It exceeded it. Congress got advance notice, not a 48-hour after-the-fact memo.
Lawler went further, noting that even if Congress passes the war powers resolution co-sponsored by Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), President Trump retains the authority to act under Article II of the Constitution. The resolution is a political gesture dressed up as a legal constraint, as The Hill reports.
"The notion that this strike is illegal or that the President needed Congress' authority is wrong."
Then came the line that should end the debate but won't:
"Furthermore, Biden and Obama conducted numerous strikes in numerous countries without Congress and none of the people screaming now, seemed to have any objections. For historical context, Congress has not declared war since WWII."
That's the heart of it. The War Powers Act has been invoked as a political weapon selectively for decades. Presidents of both parties have ordered strikes without prior congressional authorization. The sudden constitutional piety from Democrats who were silent under Obama and Biden isn't principled. It's partisan.
Earlier in the day, Massie posted on X that he was "opposed to this war" and vowed to work with Khanna when Congress reconvenes to force a vote on their war powers resolution. He declared the strikes were "not 'America First.'"
On the Democratic side, Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) called on senators to vote immediately on Sen. Tim Kaine's (D-Va.) version of a war powers resolution.
"Trump once again started a cycle of violence that has already escalated and could spiral out of control."
Kim's framing reveals the reflex. When America acts decisively against a regime that funds terrorism across the Middle East, the concern isn't whether the action was strategically sound or legally authorized. The concern is that America acted at all. The "cycle of violence" framework treats American military action and Iranian aggression as morally equivalent events in an endless loop, rather than recognizing one as the cause and the other as the response.
Members of Congress called on convening earlier than planned to force a vote. The urgency is telling. These same lawmakers have shown no comparable urgency in securing the border, funding the Department of Homeland Security, or addressing the fentanyl crisis. Lawler noticed, calling on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to stop Democratic opposition to DHS funding. The priorities speak for themselves.
Iranian officials claimed strikes hit a girls' school in southern Iran, killing more than 80 students. U.S. Central Command said it was looking into those reports. That investigation matters. But it's worth noting the source: Iranian state media, relaying figures from a government with every incentive to maximize civilian casualty numbers for propaganda purposes.
The operation targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps infrastructure. The IRGC isn't a conventional military. It's a terrorist organization that bankrolls Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. It has American blood on its hands going back decades. Strikes against its capabilities aren't reckless escalation. They're overdue for accountability.
The war powers push isn't really about constitutional authority. If it were, the same lawmakers would have raised these objections consistently across administrations. They didn't.
It's about constraining a president who is willing to use force against Iran at a moment when Iran is retaliating against American bases across the Gulf. That retaliation, targeting U.S. service members in five countries, is the actual escalation. The response to it should not be a congressional debate about whether the president had permission to act.
Massie's libertarian instincts on war are consistent, and that deserves acknowledgment. He's raised these concerns under both parties. But consistency doesn't make the argument correct at this particular moment, with American bases under fire and an adversary that reads congressional division as an invitation.
The Democrats joining him have no such consistency to claim. Their objections are calibrated to the party in the White House, not the principle at stake.
Lawler framed it plainly. Congress was briefed. The Constitution grants the president authority. The law was followed. Everything else is theater, performed while American troops are in harm's way.
The ink was barely dry on U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran before the progressive left's most predictable voices lined up to denounce the operation. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom all condemned President Trump on Saturday, calling the strikes "illegal," "unjustified," and "catastrophic."
Not one of them spared a word for the Iranian regime's decades of sponsoring terrorism, pursuing nuclear weapons, or threatening American allies. The target of their outrage was not Tehran. It was the White House.
Ocasio-Cortez accused Trump of "dragging Americans "into a war they did not want, and alleged the president "does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions." She then delivered the sort of sentence designed more for a fundraising email than a foreign policy debate:
"This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic."
Omar followed the same script, accusing Trump of "unilaterally dragging this nation into an illegal and unjustified war with Iran without congressional authorization, without a clear objective, and without any imminent threat to the United States."
No mention of Iran's nuclear ambitions. No acknowledgment of the threat a nuclear-armed theocracy poses to every American interest in the Middle East. Just the familiar refrain: America is the problem, as New York Post reports.
The most revealing response came from New York's socialist mayor. Mamdani, the Ugandan-born pol who mere days earlier had briefly bonded with Trump over potential Big Apple housing investments during a visit to the White House, pivoted hard on Saturday. His statement read like a press release from an antiwar nonprofit, not the leader of America's largest city:
"Today's military strikes on Iran, carried out by the United States and Israel, mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression."
He continued:
"Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace."
The phrase "illegal war of aggression" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. No court has ruled the strikes illegal. No international body has issued a determination. Mamdani simply declared it so, borrowing the language of left-wing activists and presenting it as fact.
Then came the pivot to local governance. Mamdani said he was in contact with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and emergency management officials to take "proactive steps, including increasing coordination across agencies and enhancing patrols of sensitive locations out of an abundance of caution." He also addressed Iranian New Yorkers directly:
"Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city, you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders."
He added, "You will be safe here."
A mayor coordinating with law enforcement during a geopolitical event is perfectly reasonable. The rest of the statement reveals the priority. Mamdani spent far more energy condemning his own country's military action than addressing any threat posed by the regime those strikes targeted.
Gavin Newsom, never one to miss a moment with national implications, attempted a more careful version of the same argument. Writing on X Saturday, the California governor acknowledged what his progressive allies would not:
"The corrupt and repressive Iranian regime must never have nuclear weapons. The leadership of Iran must go."
Strong words. But they lasted exactly one sentence before Newsom retreated to the same conclusion as the rest:
"But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war that will risk the lives of our American service members and our friends without justification to the American people."
So the regime must go, but doing anything about it is illegal and dangerous. This is the fundamental unserious posture of the modern Democratic foreign policy wing: acknowledge the threat, then oppose every action that might address it. The regime "must go," but not like this, not now, and never on a Republican president's terms.
Every one of these figures has, at some point, expressed alarm about Iran's nuclear program or its destabilizing influence in the region. Every one of them has demanded that presidents act to protect American interests abroad. Yet when action arrives, the response is instantaneous condemnation, not measured evaluation. Not "let's see the intelligence." Not "what were the objectives." Just: illegal, unjustified, catastrophic.
This is not foreign policy analysis. It is reflexive opposition dressed in constitutional language. Omar invokes "congressional authorization" as though she would vote for it if asked. She wouldn't. AOC frames the strikes as reckless while offering no alternative to a regime racing toward a nuclear weapon. Mamdani, who days ago was talking housing deals with Trump, now calls his military decisions "a war of aggression."
The pattern is always the same:
It costs nothing to say "the leadership of Iran must go" when you intend to block every path to making it happen.
Absent from every one of these statements is a simple question: What should the United States do about a theocratic regime pursuing nuclear weapons, funding terrorist proxies across the Middle East, and threatening the destruction of a key American ally?
The progressive left has no answer. It has only objections. And those objections arrive with suspicious speed, identical language, and zero engagement with the strategic reality that prompted the strikes in the first place.
When the threat is abstract, they talk tough. When the moment demands action, they reach for "illegal" and "unjustified" before the dust has settled. That is not a principle. It is positioning.