Trump Blocks Terror Warning As He Prepares To Escalate War

White House Blocks Terror Warning; Trump Promises To Escalate; Hegseth Goes Completely Unhinged

Good morning, and welcome to the world Donald Trump has made. Pull up a chair. Pour something strong. You’re going to need it.

This morning: a White House blocking federal agencies from warning local cops about terror threats created by Trump’s own war. A president threatening to annihilate 93 million people before breakfast. A son-in-law who may be filling the vacuum of American leadership — for profit. Ground troops that weren’t supposed to be on the table. And a Defense Secretary who went on 60 Minutes and threatened an entire nation.

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Now. Let’s get into it.

Trump White House Blocks Terror Warning to Local Law Enforcement

While the president was on Truth Social Saturday morning threatening Iran with annihilation, his White House was quietly doing something that should alarm every mayor, police chief, and sheriff in America: blocking the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center from warning local law enforcement that his war has raised the terror threat on American soil.

The Daily Mail is reporting that the three agencies had prepared a joint intelligence bulletin — five pages, titled “A Public Safety Awareness Report: Elevated Threat in the United States During US-Iran Conflict” — and were ready to send it to state and local authorities on Friday. It detailed elevated threats from Iranian government operatives, Iranian proxies, threats to Jewish and Israeli institutions, and the danger that radicalized individuals of varying ideologies might use the conflict as cover for violence. It included specific guidance on how local law enforcement could respond.

The bulletin never went out. DHS, breaking its own protocol, gave the White House a heads-up before releasing it. Trump officials put it on hold.

The White House did not deny killing the bulletin. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the administration was “ensuring information being disseminated is accurate, up to date, and has been properly vetted.” A senior DHS official offered a blunter translation: “They don’t want anything getting out that says what they’re doing in Iran is raising the threat level at home.” These bulletins, the official noted, are supposed to be politically untouched — neutral, fact-based, and issued without White House input. The decision to loop them in was made against the wishes of FBI leadership.

This is not an abstraction. Days after Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, a gunman opened fire at a bar in Austin, Texas, killing three people and wounding fifteen before police shot him dead. He had expressed support for the Iranian regime online before the attack. FBI counterterrorism teams were placed on elevated alert nationwide last week by FBI Director Kash Patel. The threat, in other words, is real. The bulletin was real. And the White House sat on it.

The president started a war. The war created threats at home. And now his team is managing the information about those threats before it reaches the people whose job it is to stop them.

Trump Promises “Complete Destruction” of Iran While Taking a Victory Lap

The president of the United States woke up Saturday morning and took to Truth Social to promise mass death for a country of 93 million people. Not metaphorically. Not as a negotiating tactic wrapped in plausible deniability. Literally.

“Today Iran will be hit very hard!” Trump wrote, in what passes now for presidential communication. “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Thank you for your attention to this matter. The man is threatening to erase a civilization and signed off like he was emailing about a parking dispute.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had, hours earlier, done something almost unthinkable — issued a public apology to neighboring countries for retaliatory strikes Iran launched in response to American and Israeli bombing campaigns. He said Iran wouldn’t attack its neighbors so long as those neighbors weren’t used as launchpads for strikes against Iran. It was, by any measure, a gesture of de-escalation.

Trump heard this and declared Iran “THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST.” He said they’d “surrendered.” He said other countries were thanking him, though he offered no evidence of who, exactly, was sending the thank-you notes. Iran’s office pushed back within hours, warning it would “respond decisively to any aggression from American bases.”

Six American service members have died in this war, which Trump launched one week ago without a declaration from Congress. More than 1,300 Iranians have been killed. When Time Magazine asked if Americans should worry about a strike on U.S. soil, Trump’s answer was: “I guess.”

“Some people will die,” he said. “When you go to war, some people will die.”

The president of the United States said that out loud. About American lives. Without blinking.

The Terrifying Void at the Center of American Power

Here is the central horror of this moment, stated plainly: we are fighting a war under the direction of a man whose motivations nobody — not his allies, not his Cabinet, not the people who work for him every single day — can fully explain.

Trump has made something of a brand out of this. He brags, openly, that nobody knows what he’s going to do because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. In a previous life, in a different kind of man, that might be strategic ambiguity. In Donald Trump, it is simply the truth.

Look at the faces of the people around him. Marco Rubio wears the expression of a man who has realized the building is on fire. J.D. Vance has pivoted so many times he’s lost track of which direction he’s facing. Keir Starmer looks like he’s rehearsing bad news for his cabinet. Even Benjamin Netanyahu — who has wanted American military action in this region for decades — has the energy of a man cashing a check before the bank changes its mind.

The person who may understand Trump most clearly is Jared Kushner, who is not in the government but is very much running foreign policy. Jared received a $2 billion investment from a Saudi-backed fund after leaving office — and somehow kept his father-in-law’s respect despite not cutting him in. Trump reportedly said, with blissful satisfaction, that Jared “can really work the Arabs. They like Jews to handle the money.” He seems genuinely unaware of what he just said.

The question everyone keeps dancing around: what does Trump actually want from this war? Strategic interest, security, regional stability — none of that applies. It requires familiarity with textbooks. What does apply, what has always applied across five decades of watching this man, is simpler: what’s in it for him? There is oil in Iran. Reconstruction money. Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds looking for a post-war landscape to invest in. Kushner and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff hold “the portfolio,” as Trump puts it. That word is doing a great deal of work.

Trump can’t explain why we’re at war. But his son-in-law will figure out how to profit from it.

Boots on the Ground? Trump Is Having the Conversation

Before this week, the official line was simple: no ground troops. Trump had promised it. His base had been told to expect it. No boots on the ground, no new forever wars, America First.

That line is getting wobbly.

NBC News is reporting that Trump has privately discussed deploying U.S. forces to Iran — not a full invasion, but “strategic missions”: special operations insertions, targeted action against sites that can’t be taken out from the air. No final decision has been made. But the fact that the conversation is happening tells you something.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” Trump told the New York Post this week, in what may be the most alarming deployment of sports metaphor in the history of American foreign policy. He added he “probably” wouldn’t need them. Probably.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, visiting U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, made clear the administration has no particular timetable in mind. “Our will is ironclad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control,” he said. That is either reassuring or terrifying depending on how much confidence you have in the people currently controlling it.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, for his part, was direct. “We are waiting for them,” he told NBC. “We are confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them.” Iran has been preparing, he said, for every possible scenario.

Eighteen Americans have been wounded. Six have been killed. The war is one week old.

Hegseth Says the Quiet Part at Full Volume

There is a particular kind of American official who mistakes cruelty for clarity. Pete Hegseth has located that character and moved in.

In a preview clip from a “60 Minutes” interview set to air Sunday, Hegseth was asked whether Russia assisting Iran in targeting Americans put U.S. personnel in greater danger. His answer to that legitimate question was to wave it away entirely. “No one’s putting us in danger,” he said. “We’re putting the other guys in danger.”

Fine. Macho. Predictable. But then came the line that set the internet on fire.

“The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live,” Hegseth said.

Not Iranian military commanders. Not the Revolutionary Guard. Not regime officials. Iranians. Ninety-three million of them.

Critics were swift. Writer Adam Schwarz called it “a grotesquely indiscriminate threat against the entire Iranian population,” comparing Hegseth’s language to early Gaza war rhetoric now before the International Court of Justice. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes suggested, in characteristic understatement, that threatening 91 million civilians by name might be counterproductive. Journalist Laura Jedeed flagged the precision: not terrorists, not radicals — Iranians. Justin Baragona called it what it was: a former Fox News weekend host openly threatening collective punishment.

The White House has not clarified what Hegseth meant. Presumably because they know.

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Stories You May Have Missed

Putin Is Playing Both Sides — With American Blood

While Trump has spent years cozying up to Vladimir Putin, U.S. intelligence agencies have now confirmed that Russia is actively helping Iran kill American soldiers. According to CNN and multiple other outlets, Russia has been providing Iran with intelligence about the locations and movements of American troops, ships, and aircraft — including satellite imagery from Moscow’s constellation of overhead surveillance satellites. One U.S. official described the effort as “pretty comprehensive.” The Iranian aerial attacks have grown more precise than in previous conflicts, appearing to focus on radar sites and command-and-control infrastructure in patterns that analysts say resemble Russia’s air campaign in Ukraine. When asked, Hegseth told reporters that Russia and China were “not really a factor.” When asked about it on 60 Minutes, he said the president knows who is “talking to who.” The White House declined to say whether Trump had spoken to Putin about it, or whether there would be any consequences.

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Your Own Intelligence Community Thinks This War Can’t Win

Before the bombs fell, America’s own analysts had already reached a damning conclusion. A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale U.S. assault on Iran would be unlikely to oust the Islamic Republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment. The report, completed about a week before the war began, contradicts Trump’s stated goal of “cleaning out” Iran’s leadership and installing a new ruler. It assessed that established succession protocols within the clerical and military structure are designed to preserve the state — and that Iran’s fragmented opposition is unlikely to take power. In other words, the intelligence community told the president this couldn’t achieve what he said it would achieve, and he went ahead anyway. The administration has not commented on the report.

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The DOJ Hid Epstein Files Mentioning Trump. Then Got Caught.

In a week full of catastrophic news, this one somehow got lost. An NPR investigation found that the Justice Department had withheld dozens of pages of Epstein files related to sexual abuse allegations mentioning President Trump — and after the story broke, the DOJ released 16 new pages covering three additional FBI interview summaries with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse when she was a minor. Even after the new release, 37 pages remain missing from the public database. The House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi. The White House says Trump has been “totally exonerated.” Democrats on the committee called it an ongoing cover-up. The DOJ said the withheld documents were “incorrectly coded as duplicates.” The war conveniently ensured most of America never heard a word of it.

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The Numbers Are In: America Doesn’t Want This War

For all the chest-thumping from the White House podium, the polls tell a different story. An NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that by a 56% to 44% margin, Americans oppose the military action in Iran. Just 36% approve of how Trump is handling the conflict, and a majority believe Iran represents only a minor threat or no threat at all to the United States. A separate Economist/YouGov poll pegged Trump’s overall approval at 38% — his lowest point in his second term and the lowest since November 2017, with 51% saying they strongly disapprove. Even among Republicans, support isn’t rock solid: roughly 42% of Republicans said they’d be more likely to oppose the mission if U.S. troops were killed or injured — and six Americans are already dead.

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Iran Quietly Asked for Talks. Trump Said No.

Behind the public declarations of total war and demands for unconditional surrender, a quieter drama has been playing out. Operatives from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence quietly reached out to the CIA through a third country’s intelligence service, signaling openness to discussing terms for ending the conflict. U.S. officials confirmed receiving the messages but said there are no active negotiations and that off-ramps are unlikely in the near term. Trump, who demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender earlier this week, gave the diplomatic channel the reception you’d expect. In a telling aside, Trump noted that his list of potential Iranian interlocutors was shrinking fast: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said. “Pretty soon we are not going to know anybody.” That might be the most honest thing he’s said all week.