President Donald Trump lashed out at the four Republican senators who voted to block him from resuming the war with Iran, in a resolution that marks one of the biggest schisms between the Republican-controlled Senate and the White House during Trump’s second term.
“These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday night, accusing the “four Republican Losers” of helping Iran when he had the country “on the ‘ropes,’ ready to go down for the fall.”
Another two Republicans, Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and Dave McCormick (Pennsylvania), missed the vote, which passed 50-48. Democrat Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted against it.
The measure, which passed the House this month, is based on the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a law designed to ensure congressional oversight of U.S. involvement in military conflicts. The White House has argued that the law is unconstitutional and also is irrelevant now because the war has ended.
The Senate measure cannot be vetoed, but Democrats and Republicans disagree on whether it can be enforced.
I hate to think what would happen if this gets to the Supreme Court.
More on Iran, from David E. Sanger and Yeganeh Torbati at The New York Times (gift article): Trump Is Making Big Claims About the Iran Talks. Iran Keeps Contradicting Him.
President Trump was eager on Tuesday morning to announce the latest concession that he says his negotiators extracted from Iran, writing on social media that the country had agreed to allow the “highest level Nuclear Inspections long into the future (Infinity!!!).”
But he omitted the fact that as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran is required to allow in international inspectors. And his statement came after the Iranians had insisted that there were no plans to allow inspectors into the three major nuclear sites the United States bombed a year ago — and where just about all the nation’s enriched uranium is stored.
America’s sad Iran negotiating team: Jared Kushner, his golfing buddy Steve Witkoff, and VP JD Vance.
The previous day, Vice President JD Vance, leaving the negotiating site at a Swiss resort, said Iran had agreed that if Iranian assets were unfrozen, the United States and Qatari officials would oversee the process and the money would be used to buy American farm products. The Iranians denied that, too, saying that the 14-point memorandum of understanding they had signed with the Americans did not require them to do so.
Negotiating with Iran has always been an extraordinary challenge. But until recently, one rule of diplomatic bargaining has usually held: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” That is how the United States and Iran traditionally have left themselves some trading space, and fine-tuned wording to satisfy the many critics at home who will have to be sold on any agreement. In 2015, when details of the inner-sanctum negotiations leaked, American officials complained bitterly, saying that the news reports were making it harder to get to a final deal.
But in this negotiation the leaks are replaced by official, if fragmentary, announcements — usually from the American side. Mr. Trump’s style is often to describe his preferred outcomes as fully negotiated side deals, in hopes of locking the Iranians into each element of any eventual agreement.
But in this negotiation the leaks are replaced by official, if fragmentary, announcements — usually from the American side. Mr. Trump’s style is often to describe his preferred outcomes as fully negotiated side deals, in hopes of locking the Iranians into each element of any eventual agreement.
The Iranians have Trump’s number, alright. A bit more from the article:
Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran and the vice president for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, one of Washington’s leading think tanks, said that both “Washington and Tehran are engaged in a public battle to shape the narrative and advance their preferred outcome on specific elements of the negotiations.”
The public divergence, she added, “highlights how little has actually been agreed upon yet and what an enormous gap has to be addressed in a short period of time.”
In fact, there were elements of truth in both what Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance were arguing, and in the Iranian rebuttal. And dissecting the differences helps explain why this negotiation is likely to be painful — and long.
If only they had just bitten the bullet and released the Epstein files. But Trump was desperate to distract from them, and now we are up shit creek in a stupid war. You can use the gift link to read the rest if you wish.
More military news: Pete Hegseth has fired another distinguished general, and his decision to make the flu vaccine voluntary has backfired bigtime.
Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan at The Atlantic (gift article): Another Top General Is Out at the Pentagon.
General Chris “C. D.” Donahue was the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan during the chaotic 2021 withdrawal. As the head of Army forces in Europe and Africa, he has helped bolster Ukraine in its fight to repel the Russian invasion. Now Donahue has become the latest casualty in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s purge of the military’s senior ranks.
Donahue’s abrupt departure, after just 18 months in his role, is another sign of the upheaval. He was widely seen as one of the Army’s rising stars—a legendary Delta Force leader who was considered a top candidate for Army chief of staff or even chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—having distinguished himself in wars of the past two decades. But Hegseth has sought to oust anyone who doesn’t fit his idea of a military leader, including those involved in the calamitous American exit from Kabul under President Biden—no matter how well they performed there. Donahue is expected to announce as soon as tomorrow that he will be relinquishing his post later this summer, two people familiar with the matter told us.
Gen. Christopher Donahue in 2025. Lucy North PA via Getty Images file
A career Ranger and Special Operations commander, Donahue served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, climbing through the ranks during two decades of counterterrorism wars. As the U.S. military shifted its focus from hunting terrorist networks to preparing for conflicts against technologically sophisticated adversaries, Donahue did as well. In recent years, he took on a top role in Europe as the Pentagon adapted lessons from Ukraine and other modern battlefields. His departure continues the exit of a generation of combat-tested leaders at a time when Hegseth is reshaping the military’s senior ranks under a banner of “less generals, more GIs.” Once Donahue leaves, the military is also expected to downgrade U.S. Army Europe and Africa from a four-star command to three, as part of the military’s effort to consolidate commands. Whether Donahue’s departure would coincide with the downgrading wasn’t immediately clear. President Trump and Hegseth are reviewing the military’s footprint in Europe, pressing governments there to take on a greater defense burden and amid friction over other NATO members’ reluctance to join the war in Iran. Hegseth’s spokesman referred questions to the Army, which declined to comment….
Donahue was positioned to help reshape the way that the Army wages war. He had been leading the service’s effort to take lessons from Ukraine and apply them to future conflicts. His departure follows that of General Randy George, the Army chief of staff whom Hegseth forced out this spring. George had been tasked with restocking key air-defense munitions, which have been seriously depleted by the Iran war.
Donahue would be at least the sixth three- or four-star Army general to depart unexpectedly, out of the roughly 60 generals in the service who hold those ranks. They include the well-regarded General James Mingus, a former Army vice chief of staff. “It’s interesting that the guy who says he wants to bring back the warrior culture is expunging the biggest warriors in the Army ranks,” one retired Army officer told us. “This is not a war on woke. This is a war on warriors.”
Donahue, who is 56, is a Pennsylvania native and a West Point graduate. He was on Capitol Hill on 9/11 with Richard Myers, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He went on to command the 82nd Airborne Division, among other senior posts.
Use the gift link to read more if you’re interested.
Tom Latchem at The Daily Beast on the military flu outbreak: Pentagon Pete Humiliated by Major U-Turn as Air Force Flu Outbreak Explodes.
The U.S. military has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s flu vaccine rules after an outbreak at a U.S. Air Force base spread to affect at least 222 recruits.
Hegseth, 45, made the annual flu shot optional for troops in April, tearing up a requirement that had stood since 1945 in a move that broke with decades of public health guidance. Only about 40 percent of new trainees at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas had been jabbed when the outbreak took hold in early June, down from a previous rate of nearly 100 percent.
Now the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all quietly performed a U-turn, once again requiring flu shots for basic trainees, officials told ABC News, which first reported the worsening crisis. The Pentagon has granted the services formal exceptions to Hegseth’s own policy.
The numbers are getting worse by the day. As of Tuesday, at least 222 recruits at Lackland Air Force Base had been diagnosed with flu, and four had been hospitalized, two sources familiar with the matter told the network. That is up from 159 cases and two hospitalizations a week earlier.
One recruit has died. Keon McDaniel was in his sixth week of basic training when he suffered a medical emergency on June 12 and was rushed to Brooke Army Medical Center, where he died on June 16, according to the Air Force. The cause remains under investigation. It is not yet clear whether the death is linked to the outbreak.
Recruits are at particular risk. They live in tightly packed bays, shower communally and spend their days within arm’s reach of one another through drills and inspections—exhausted, stressed and crammed together in exactly the conditions where a respiratory virus can thrive.
Some results from yesterday’s elections. The biggest news is from New York, where Mayor Mamdani had a powerful influence.
The Washington Post (gift article): Mamdani emerges as kingmaker, and other takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries.
Nancy Lacore, a former Navy admiral who was fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, won the Democratic nomination for the First Congressional District of South Carolina, according to The Associated Press.
Nancy Lacore, a 35-year veteran of the Navy, was an admiral when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired her last year. She said she was not given a reason.Credit…Nancy Lacore for Congress
Ms. Lacore defeated Mac Deford, a Coast Guard veteran who was previously the general counsel for the town of Hilton Head Island.
Now, Ms. Lacore faces a difficult task: flipping a seat currently held by a Republican, Representative Nancy Mace, who ran unsuccessfully for governor instead of seeking re-election. The coastal district was redrawn in 2021 to be more reliably Republican. Ms. Mace won re-election by double-digit percentages in each of her past two elections.
But Democrats, who view Ms. Lacore’s military biography as a potentially game-changing asset, are still eyeing the seat despite how difficult it may be to flip. House Majority PAC, the main House Democratic super PAC, has reserved $2.1 million in the district for the fall, according to AdImpact, a media tracking platform.
Ms. Lacore has a higher-than-average profile for a political newcomer. Last August, Mr. Hegseth fired her after 35 years in the Navy. She has said she was given no cause for the firing, which came at a time when Mr. Hegseth was removing military officials who had delivered intelligence assessments that angered President Trump.
There’s a concerning story out of Texas today. I hadn’t heard about it before. A group of so-called Antifa activists have been sentenced to startlingly long sentences in a case about demonstrations outside a customs enforcement detention center. The e was violence involved, but the sentences still seem troubling.
Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo: Prairieland ‘Antifa’ Activists Sentenced to Decades in Prison on ‘Terrorism’ Charges.
Federal judges in Fort Worth handed down maximum sentences to eight people charged in connection with a July 2025 demonstration outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center that devolved into vandalism and the shooting of a police officer.
Benjamin Song was sentenced to 100 years in prison and Maricela Rueda to 70. Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto, Meaghan Morris, Autumn Hill, and Zachary Evetts each received sentences of 50 years. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not at the demonstration, was sentenced to 30 years on charges relating to concealing documents in the investigation. Judges in the Northern District of Texas ruled that each defendant will serve their sentence on each charge consecutively, dramatically lengthening their time in prison.
The case has been seen as a barometer for how far the Trump administration can go in its campaign to crack down on political opponents, in part by using broad conspiracy statutes to sweep people accused of very different conduct into one single alleged terrorism plot.
Officials at DOJ and DHS have held the case up as a prime example of their fight against the broad cohort of anti-administration activism that they deem “Antifa.” After the defendants were convicted in March, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the verdict would “not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”
The prosecution focused on events that took place at ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility on July 4 of last year. There, demonstrators arrived dressed in black to hold a “noise demonstration” involving fireworks to show support for those detained in the facility. A group of demonstrators broke off from the group; they began to vandalize cars and surveillance infrastructure outside the facility. After a police officer arrived, Song picked up a rifle and shot the responding officer, wounding him.
Federal prosecutors initially charged the group with attempted murder of a federal officer and use of a firearm. But after the killing of Charlie Kirk, the White House issued sweeping directives to stage a crackdown on Trump’s political opponents, and federal prosecutors in Dallas-Fort Worth ramped up the charges. They framed the group as the “North Texas Antifa Cell,” and brought charges of material support of terrorism against the activists….
The Prairieland case was the first in what’s becoming a nationwide trend of broad conspiracy cases brought against protestors. In Alabama, prosecutors brought material support for terrorism charges against a pair of people who allegedly set a shopping cart on fire in a Walmart after a Black Lives Matter protest. In Minneapolis this month, prosecutors charged a group of ICE protestors in a conspiracy indictment that centered on their supposed involvement in “Antifa.”
In Prairieland, prosecutors folded defendants who were not alleged to have committed any act of violence into a case that centered on allegations around the attempted murder of a responding police officer. Savanna Batten and Elizabeth Soto, two area activists, were not alleged to have belonged to discussion groups where the demonstration was planned. In Batten’s case, prosecutors relied on her black garb as a means to tie her to the conspiracy; in Soto’s, prosecutors argued that her black clothing and her operation of a small printing press that produced anarchist “zines” tied her to the conspiracy. Both received sentences of 50 years on Tuesday.
Read more at the link.
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