Trump Team Goes To War With Itself As Tucker Says He's Blackmailed
Trump Contradicts Vance; Swalwell Collapses; Tucker Says Trump Is Blackmailed; Oligarchs Continue Swallowing Media
Good morning.
This morning, the Iran war is fracturing in real time — and it’s fracturing at the top. Trump’s own team cannot agree on what they’re negotiating, the president is actively undermining his vice president while peace talks are underway, and the administration is now threatening to yank the broadcast licenses of any outlet that dares report what’s actually happening on the ground. Meanwhile, the billionaires are buying up what’s left of the press, and the FCC chair is essentially telling what remains: fall in line or lose your license.
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THE TRUMP TEAM IS AT WAR WITH ITSELF — OVER IRAN
Here is what we know this morning. JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff have all been dispatched to Pakistan for ceasefire negotiations with Iran. The problem? They don’t agree on what the United States is actually demanding.
Vance has been firm: Iran must have zero uranium enrichment capacity, period. But sources say Kushner and Witkoff floated a dramatically softer position just weeks ago — one in which the U.S. would actually supply Iran with uranium for civilian purposes, in exchange for Tehran agreeing not to enrich it into weapons-grade material. Iran rejected that outright.
So now you have the vice president arriving at the table with one set of demands, while the president’s son-in-law was apparently making the opposite pitch just six weeks prior. The U.S. position going into these negotiations is not a position at all. It is a contradiction.
Iran has already signaled it doesn’t trust Kushner or Witkoff, viewing earlier talks with them as a setup — a pretext Trump used to convince Tehran they were negotiating in good faith before launching the attack on February 28th. Iranian officials have said they would prefer to deal exclusively with Vance. They’ve also warned that key preconditions — a ceasefire in Lebanon, the release of frozen assets — have not been met, and whether these talks proceed at all remains an open question. Iran’s military says it has its “fingers on the trigger.”
And while all of that was developing, Trump took to Truth Social Saturday morning to undermine it entirely.
“The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate,” he wrote — about the country his vice president was in the air flying toward for peace talks. He bragged about killing Iranian leaders, invoked Allah, declared Iran’s military was “LOSING BIG,” and made no mention whatsoever of Vance, Kushner, Witkoff, or the fact that negotiations were beginning that very morning in Islamabad.
Trump also addressed the Strait of Hormuz — which Iran effectively closed as a direct result of his war, sending global oil and gas prices to levels not seen since 1967. He framed clearing the Strait as a favor to the world, not as the economic emergency it actually is. He has been pressing NATO allies to help him reopen it. Most have declined. His administration is now reportedly weighing punishments for the allies that won’t get on board.
SWALWELL’S CAMPAIGN FALLS APART
California Congressman Eric Swalwell’s bid for governor suffered a potentially fatal blow Friday, after a former staffer accused him of sexual assault in a report by the San Francisco Chronicle. His own campaign chairman, Congressman Jimmy Gomez, immediately resigned from the campaign and called on Swalwell to drop out of the race entirely.
“The congressman should leave the race now so there can be full accountability without doubt, distraction, or delay,” Gomez wrote in his statement.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa went further, calling on Swalwell to resign from Congress altogether, saying the reporting revealed someone “unfit” to have entered the race in the first place. Villaraigosa also accused Swalwell of attempting to silence accusers to protect his campaign, calling it “a shameful disgrace to our democracy.”
Swalwell has not yet announced whether he will withdraw.
IS NETANYAHU BLACKMAILING TRUMP? TUCKER CARLSON THINKS IT’S WORTH ASKING.
Tucker Carlson’s newsletter this week floated a theory that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be using blackmail to keep the United States locked into the Iran war. The piece points to a 1998 account from Monica Lewinsky’s testimony before the Office of Independent Counsel, in which she said President Clinton told her he believed a foreign embassy was tapping his phones — just one month after meeting with Netanyahu at the White House.
A 2014 book by political writer Daniel Halper, based on on-the-record interviews and hundreds of pages of documents, alleged that Israeli officials at the 1998 Wye River peace talks had obtained recordings of Clinton and Lewinsky and used the mere mention of those tapes as leverage to pressure Clinton into releasing convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.
Carlson’s newsletter suggests Netanyahu — who has reportedly pushed for a U.S. attack on Iran for decades — may be employing similar pressure against Trump to keep Operation Epic Fury going. The theory is unproven. The newsletter itself acknowledges that. But the fact that it’s circulating in pro-Trump independent media circles is worth noting, if only because it reflects a growing split on the right over whether this war actually serves American interests — or someone else’s.
THE PRESS IS UNDER THREAT — AND THE BUYOUTS ARE ALREADY HAPPENING
FCC Chair Brendan Carr has threatened to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage, warning outlets to “correct course before their license renewals come up.” Trump endorsed the threat, calling certain news organizations “corrupt and highly unpatriotic.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called on reporters to be more “patriotic” and write more optimistic headlines about the war. And at a Pentagon briefing, sources say Hegseth expressed enthusiasm about a billionaire ally of the president moving to acquire a major cable news network — because, the implication was clear, the coverage would change once he did.
That is the Secretary of Defense rooting for a friendlier owner to take over a news network. Out loud. At a government briefing.
This is not a media story. This is a democracy story. Independent outlets are being scooped up by billionaire investors — not just the Washington Post and the LA Times, but outlets across the country, one by one, folding into the portfolios of people with direct financial and political ties to the people they’re supposed to be covering. The ones that aren’t being bought are being threatened with regulatory punishment if they don’t run cover for an increasingly unpopular war.
As one communications attorney put it, the real hammer here is not license revocation — it’s the implicit threat of regulatory retaliation against companies that need federal approvals for their mergers and business deals. The chilling effect is the point. You don’t have to actually pull a license if the fear of it is enough to make a network soften its coverage, sideline its best reporters, and decide that keeping the administration happy is safer than keeping the public informed.
Senator Chris Murphy said it plainly: “We aren’t on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. We are in the middle of it.”
Corporate media isn’t just failing to challenge power right now. Much of it is actively helping power consolidate. Independent media has never been more important. And it has never been under more pressure.
WHY RAW AMERICA EXISTS — AND WHY WE NEED YOU NOW
Let’s be direct about what is happening.
The government is threatening to pull broadcast licenses from outlets that won’t cheerlead a war. Billionaires are buying up the newsrooms that remain. And the reporters still doing real work — the ones in the hearing rooms, the ones asking the questions power doesn’t want asked — are running out of places to do it.
Raw America exists to be one of those places. Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most important hearings of this political moment. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool. We are going after the interviews that matter and bringing them directly to you — unfiltered, unbought, and unafraid.
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We are at the moment this work was built for. The war is accelerating. The press is being swallowed. The people in power are counting on you to scroll past this and do nothing.
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John, Justin and The Raw America Team
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STORIES FROM THE LAST 24 HOURS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
Vance Flew to Budapest to Stump for Orbán — It May Have Backfired. Hungary holds a historic parliamentary election tomorrow that could end Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power. The latest independent polls show opposition leader Péter Magyar’s Tisza party comfortably ahead, with prediction markets now giving Orbán only around a 28% chance of winning. JD Vance flew to Budapest this week to appear at a pro-Orbán rally, and sources say the White House show of support may have actually cost the incumbent votes due to public anger over the Iran war and rising prices. A defeat for Orbán would be a direct rebuke to Trump’s model of exporting illiberal democracy — and Washington is watching closely.
Trump Unveiled Plans for a 250-Foot Golden Arch in Washington. While the Iran war drags on and gas prices spike, the Trump administration this week released official plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch to be built near the Lincoln Memorial, topped with a gilded winged Lady Liberty flanked by eagles and lions, with “One Nation Under God” inscribed in gold. American taxpayers will help fund it, and Trump has said the arch is for “me.” Veterans have already filed suit to block it, calling it a vanity project that would obstruct views of Arlington National Cemetery. The Commission of Fine Arts — stacked with Trump appointees — takes it up next week.
Trump Replaced Immigration Judges — Asylum Grants Have Collapsed to 7%. The White House this week boasted that under Trump, asylum is now granted in just 7% of cases, down from over 50% under Biden, after the administration replaced what it called “activist judges” with loyalists committed to aggressive deportation. Immigration attorneys and civil rights groups say due process has been gutted, and lawsuits are piling up in federal courts across the country.
Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg Both Signaled 2028 Runs at the Same Event. Harris and Buttigieg headlined a gathering of Democratic presidential contenders in New York City, with Harris dropping her strongest hints yet about a 2028 White House campaign. The early jockeying signals an unusually wide-open Democratic primary is already underway — with no clear frontrunner and the party still sorting out its identity in the Trump era.
Artemis II Astronauts Splashed Down After Historic Moon Mission. NASA’s Artemis II crew returned to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, completing a historic mission that took humans around the moon for the first time in over 50 years. It was the kind of story that, in a different political moment, would have dominated the news cycle for a week. Instead, it barely registered — a reminder of just how much is happening right now.