World

President Donald Trump's conduct has reportedly "cratered" one the most important U.S. alliances, according to the New York Times, with advisors urging "fed up" U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ditch the "special relationship" between the two countries.

In a report released on Friday, the Times said that Starmer is "looking to diversify his friend group" as Trump makes the U.S. "into an increasingly grumpy and unreliable partner for Britain." This was evident in a Thursday trip to Saudi Arabia, where he pledged "to show that we stand with our allies" in the Gulf states, only interacting with Trump near the end of the trip.

"That was no accident," Michael D. Shear, the lead U.K. correspondent for the Times, wrote. "Mr. Starmer’s new approach, which follows almost a year in which he repeatedly tried to cozy up to Mr. Trump, is part of a broader strategy to move Britain closer to partners in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere as the relationship with the United States sours."

Despite his efforts to be "chummy" with Trump, the U.S. president has engaged in "repeated taunts and mockery" towards the U.K. This has led Starmer to alter his approach, taking a firmer stance against Trump and refusing to get involved in the Iran conflict

"I'm fed up," Starmer said in a Thursday interview, making a rare reference to Trump by name when he blamed spikes in energy costs for U.K. residents on "the actions of Putin or Trump across the world.”

In the same interview, Starmer reserved particular outrage for Trump's widely condemned Easter weekend Truth Social post threatening to wipe Iran's "whole civilization" if peace terms were not accepted soon.

“Let me be really clear about this,” the prime minister said, “They are not words I would use — ever use — because I come at this with our British values and principles.”

Peter Ricketts, "a veteran British diplomat who served as the country’s first national security adviser," also weighed in on the fraying "special relationship" this week, encouraging Starmer to outright abandon reliance on the U.S. and expand relations with Europe.

“We do have to rethink the idea that the U.S. is a reliable, trustworthy ally on which we can depend in the longer term,” Ricketts told BBC Radio. “We’ve got to get closer to the Europeans. We’ve got to work out how we live in a world where American interest has moved away from Europe.”

During former Joe Biden's four years as president, he warned that if Donald Trump ever returned to the White House, it would pose a dire threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — which Biden viewed as vital to the United States from a national security standpoint. Biden applauded Sweden and Finland when they decided to join NATO and hoped that more European countries would do the same.

But U.S. relations with longtime NATO allies took a turn for the worse after Trump became president again, from tariffs to Trump wanting to buy Greenland to Trump calling for Canada to become "the 51st state." And the Iran war is only adding to the tensions.

In an article published on April 10, Bloomberg News' Wes Kosova stresses that NATO allies, frustrated over Iran, are becoming bolder in their defiance of Trump.

"An unusual thing happened when Donald Trump demanded America's allies help him end his war against Iran," Kosova explains. "They said no…. In waves of social media posts, the president not so subtly hinted that he'd walk away from NATO if his counterparts didn't comply. Trump, who'd grown accustomed to European leaders contorting themselves to avoid the worst of his wrath over tariffs and NATO dues, might have expected that they'd grudgingly go along this time too. Instead, they rejected his commands in uncharacteristically blunt terms."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for example, described the Iran war as "not a matter for NATO" — and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, similarly, said, "This is not our war, and we're not going to be dragged into it." Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was highly critical of Trump's "illegal, absurd, cruel war."

"This week's shaky ceasefire agreement highlighted the president's isolation from some of the U.S.' most steadfast friends and has exposed his weakening powers to force other nations to do what he wants," Kosova notes. "The two-week pause in hostilities wasn't the result of behind-the-scenes footwork by the leaders of France, Germany or the UK. It instead took an intervention by distant Pakistan, whose citizens Trump has barred from immigrating to the U.S., to provide the escape the president was seeking from a conflict that had escalated beyond his control. Trump largely kept allies in the dark about his war plans."

According to Sascha Lohmann of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, "almost nobody on the record" in European NATO countries is "saying we should support" Trump's war against Iran.

Lohmann told Bloomberg News, "There may be a certain pain threshold that he could inflict, and then, the allies would just jump and support it. I would be skeptical."

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have "debased" the U.S. military one analyst wrote in a blistering column.

The New Republic's Brynn Tannehill, a former naval aviator and defense analyst, warns that the volatility of the Iran war mixed with "Trump’s temperament, means [the U.S.] may be back to hostilities next week or tomorrow."

Tannehill explained that the situation has become a mess and the "ceasefire" seems to be causing more questions than answers. More importantly, however, Tannehill cautioned that "there's a deeper story that’s been happening with the military during Trump’s second term, of which too few Americans are aware."

Trump and Hegseth have been systematically dismantling Pentagon checks against illegal/immoral orders. Their moves pave the way for war crimes in the escalating Iran war.

She began with the pardon Trump made in his first term of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who posed with a teenager's murdered body and was accused by teammates of targeting civilians. Tannehill said that it was the first signal of Trump's ethos. Meanwhile, Hegseth echoes the sentiment, celebrating "warriors" over ethics.

"One of the first acts of the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon was to purge the military of its top lawyers (also known as JAGs, or judge advocate generals)," the column explained. "JAGs perform the critical function of assessing the legality of anything done within the military. One piece at The Atlantic correctly described them as the 'conscience' of the military."

Then they "dismissed the Joint Chiefs chairman, the chief of naval operations, and Air Force vice chief," recalled Tannehill.

Hegseth claimed that it was because he didn't want any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” That has never been an issue in the past. So, Tannehill believes that his real "goal was to remove anyone who might raise ethical objections to anything the military was ordered to do by the administration."

The firings have continued: Adm. Alvin Holsey retired over disputed Caribbean airstrikes on drug vessels; Army Chief Gen. Randy George was ousted for refusing to scrub female/Black troops from promotions; Chaplain Corps chief Maj. Gen. William Green and Gen. David Hodne were axed amid the Iran conflict, an unprecedented move.

Remaining officers despair, explained Tannehill. She explained that quitting harms troops in the field, and replacements willing to obey blindly makes things worse. It can put the U.S. into a Vietnam-like escalation spiral. U.S. lacks a coherent Iran plan beyond bombing, she said.

Now Iran is reacting by controlling the Strait of Hormuz, causing a 93 percent drop in traffic of goods and oil to cease altogether. It has crippled Asian economies, and now Iran is demanding that it control it completely. They've put $2 million tolls on each oil ship, and thus far, Europe has refused to pay them.

Earlier this week, Trump threatened to bomb Iran’s electrical grid, making a "dual-use" argument. Roads, bridges and power plants are used by both civilians and the military. The larger problem is that the military isn't likely to be the casualty; civilians are. Experts warn it risks war crimes if disproportionate civilian harm occurs. Iran isn't expected to give in. Even if the power grid is hit, it is fairly decentralized and generators are common.

With no nukes (Russia fears), no invasion (draft needed) and humiliation unacceptable, water infrastructure attacks seem the only option.

"While destroying the electrical grid will result in some civilian casualties, depriving the country of water is likely to cause mass death in the millions, governmental collapse, and a refugee crisis unlike anything the world has seen in modern times. Iran is already teetering on the brink of disaster with its water supply: Destroying dams and desalination plants would almost certainly push it over the edge," warned Tannehill.

"Americans may not just be remembered for electing a felon in 2024, or a demagogue or the best friend of a child rapist," she closed. "They may be remembered for electing a mass-murdering regime that telegraphed its intent for years."

For many years, the United States and Canada — a fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — enjoyed a very close relationship. But U.S./Canada relations became strained when U.S. President Donald Trump called for Canada to become "the 51st state" and threatened the country with steep tariffs. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney remains adamant in saying that Canada has no desire to become part of the United States.

According to author Robert Hardman, Trump raised the possibility of annexing Canada when he was writing his new book on Britain's royal family, "Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story."

CTV News' Afua Hagan, in an article published on April 9, explains, "Hardman and Trump met in Florida in December 2025 where they discussed the United States place in NATO as well as Trump's thoughts on Canada. 'I replied that this would probably destroy NATO and, while we were on the subject, could he please leave Canada alone too,' Hardman wrote."

Hardman also wrote, "This was the closest I had heard to an acknowledgement that, as long as Canada had the king, Mr. Trump was not going to usurp him. There could be no doubting the esteem in which the late queen was held by Mr. Trump. He had also voiced the highest praise for her son and heir, who appeared to be the primary reason why he was no longer saber-rattling at Canada."

Despite comments from the White House on Wednesday, the Strait of Hormuz is not open — a condition of President Donald Trump to end his role in the bombing campaign against Iran.

Brett McGurk, the former Middle East and North Africa coordinator for the National Security Council, told CNN on Thursday that it's clear the White House is just as lost as everyone else about the state of the war or the ceasefire.

"The key precondition is not being met," he said. "And that's what the Pakistani prime minister's first statement [was] about. What this was about, there'd be a ceasefire and the Strait would reopen. That has not happened. So, therefore, where are we? I think this ceasefire is extremely fragile. I think there's a decent chance it's going to break down here over the coming days."

However, if the agreement holds, "there's no firing. I think that's very positive," said McGurk.

Overnight, Vice President JD Vance agreed to meet with Pakistani and Iranian leaders at the most senior levels. McGurk said that Vance must be careful because it's clear that coming out of such a meeting without the Strait's opening would be disastrous for the U.S.

"It would be extremely damaging. So I would be very cautious heading into that meeting. And I think we should hold very firm. The Strait opens, or else there's really no ceasefire, and there's not going to be a meeting," said McGurk.

Karim Sadjapour, an American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CNN that the only objective Iran had in the war was to survive.

"And when President Trump first attacked, on the eve of the attack, he called for people to eventually go out into the streets and said to the people of Iran, 'The country is yours to take.' And so that metric was set very high on our end. It was to potentially change the regime to totally destroy their nuclear program, their missile program. Now the conversation has shifted."

As recently as yesterday, Trump suggested a joint venture between America and Iran to control rhe Strait of Hormuz.

"So, the conversation has totally shifted from regime change in Iran to potential joint ventures and peace with Iran," Sadjapour said. "And the other thing I'd say to accentuate something Brett said earlier, when you listen to the language of [Mohammad-Bagher] Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament in Tehran, and JD Vance, the vice president, who are potentially going to meet, it sounds like Ghalibaf is the representative of the superpower in JD Vance is the representative of a regional power which is desperate for peace."

CNN host John Berman asked what that meant, and Sadjapour said that he thinks that Iran will overplay its hand.

McGurk said that he hopes the U.S. would already know what the goals are, what it will ask for and what the plan is for the negotiation before the vice president arrives.

"But meanwhile, if Iran is controlling the Strait of Hormuz and we have just legitimized this new system with Ghalibaf, whoever's actually in charge as they control the Strait of Hormuz, that is exactly what Iran wants," McGurk continued. "They want this historic meeting, the Islamabad meeting, which will be called for all time with the American vice president as they are controlling the Strait of Hormuz. That's the precedent they want to set. And I do not think we should walk into that trap."

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, where he faced off against President Donald Trump's claims against NATO.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been in place since after World War II, with the specific purpose of working to face threats to Europe and the U.S. They were huge players after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which the U.S. invoked the Article 5 agreement for an attack on Afghanistan.

Former U.S. Representative to NATO, Ivo Daaler, told CNN on Thursday that it does appear the only way people can speak rationally with Trump is through charm and flattery.

Daaler hoped this was the tactic Rutte was deploying to steer Trump in the right direction. NATO's biggest foe over the years has been the former Soviet Union and, now, Russia. The country has long endeavored to undermine the group. Trump told the press last week that Russian President Vladimir Putin had convinced him to withdraw from the group, a move that can only be accomplished with congressional approval.

The fear, Daaler has, is that things are different."The breach is bigger. And, I think it's no longer flattery that is going to do things. And I think he was trying to explain what NATO was about, and I'm not sure if the president was listening."

The White House is angry about NATO refusing to back its war with Iran. Daaler had suggestions for how to fix that.

"I think the White House should be looking at its own behavior to explain it," Daaler explained. "If you decide to go to war, that is generally regarded as illegal under international law and unnecessary because there were many other routes to try to achieve the goals that you were trying to achieve."

In the recent example, Trump went to war with Iran and didn't even inform NATO or allies in the region, which likely would have withdrawn diplomats and soldiers from the region.

"Don't be surprised that they may wake up the next day and say, well, wait a minute, we're not part of this. We weren't involved. We weren't asked to be involved. We weren't informed about what it is you were going to do, and now you just want to go out and make sure that you use our airspace and the bases on our territory to do that. We have some questions," said the former ambassador.

Trump has used NATO's lack of engagement in IRan to justify his claims that NATO is a burden and not a benefit to the United States.

Now, Trump is looking for ways to "make Europe Pay for his own mistakes," said Daaler.

"And as a result, the alliance is so much weaker than it has been for so long because the president of the United States is basically saying, you sort out your own security, we sort out ours," Daaler continued. "The problem is that for the United States to sort out its own security, it actually needs NATO. It needs Europe. It can't conduct the war that it has just conducted for five and a half weeks without access to European bases and European airspace. And so he should spend some time figuring out exactly what it is that Europe does, even when they don't support the United States in the."

President Donald Trump is degrading his own vice president, JD Vance, over the latter’s opposition to the former’s Iran war — and it is painfully obvious to White House observers.

“Nobody in Mr. Trump’s inner circle was more worried about the prospect of war with Iran, or did more to try to stop it, than the vice president,” reported The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman on Tuesday. “Mr. Vance had built his political career opposing precisely the kind of military adventurism that was now under serious consideration. He had described a war with Iran as ‘a huge distraction of resources’ and massively expensive.’”

The Times elaborated that, although Vance is not a dove, he privately expressed the belief that a regime-change war in Iran would end badly for the United States. Because Trump wished to engage in some military action against Iran, Vance urged limited action rather than a large-scale campaign, even advocating for Trump to use “overwhelming force, in the hope of achieving his objectives quickly.”

Yet the president has reportedly noticed Vance’s reticence to declare war against Iran and is politically penalizing his own vice president accordingly, including through public displays of how he is out of the loop.

“The White House’s plans to completely annihilate Iran are so haphazard that even the vice president can’t keep up with them,” reported The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling on Tuesday. “JD Vance was apparently caught off guard Tuesday when a journalist informed him that Donald Trump had threatened to obliterate the entire Iranian civilization by 8 p.m. Vance was onstage in Budapest at the time, feet away from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.”

Even though Vance was at an event with a powerful foreign leader and Trump ally, he was forced to acknowledge that he was not part of the president’s policymaking inner circle.

“Wouldn’t you like to know the subject of this message?” Vance said at one point. “But no, uh, I need to read it first before I talk about it. But here’s, here’s … uh, what time is it in the United States right now?”

Overall, as the Times noted, Trump has emerged as a foreign policy hawk who does not want participation from those who question his judgment.

“In the end, even the more skeptical members of Mr. Trump’s war Cabinet — with the stark exception of Mr. Vance, the figure inside the White House most opposed to a full-scale war — deferred to the president’s instincts, including his abundant confidence that the war would be quick and decisive,” the Times reported. “The White House declined to comment.”

Further emphasizing how Trump does not Vance, the Times noted that the president prioritized secrecy for the meeting.

"'The gathering had been kept deliberately small to guard against leaks," the Times reported. "Other top Cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening. Also absent was the vice president."

By contrast, the Times reported that the biggest supporter of the Iran war in Trump’s Cabinet was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“Within the Cabinet, Mr. Hegseth was the biggest proponent of a military campaign against Iran,” the Times reported, contrasting his attitude with that of Trump’s Secretary of State. “Mr. Rubio indicated to colleagues that he was much more ambivalent. He did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal, but his preference was to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war. Mr. Rubio, however, did not try to talk Mr. Trump out of the operation, and after the war began he delivered the administration’s justification with full conviction.”

Writing for USA Today in March, conservative columnist Dace Potas observed that Trump’s war against Iran is hurting Vance’s chances to become the Republican presidential nominee in 2028.

“I don’t have any serious issue with the Trump administration’s actions in Iran,” Potas wrote last month. “Immediately following our initial strikes, I wrote that the actions should have gone through Congress, but that I generally support military action against Iran, and I stand by my view.”

Despite his personal support for the war, though, Potas anticipated bad things politically for Vance as a result of it.

“Trump invoked the rhetoric of isolationism on the reelection campaign trail, promising no new wars to MAGA voters who rallied around that aspect of the ‘America First’ brand,” Potas wrote, adding that this is politically inconvenient for the more isolationist Vance.

“Vance is a more talented candidate than [2028 Democratic frontrunner former Vice President Kamala] Harris, but I’m not sure that’s enough to overcome his involvement in an unpopular administration,” Potas wrote. “Nor is it all that clear how he reconciles his intellectual opposition to interventionist foreign policy with his involvement in an administration active in that arena.”

Back in 1987 — the year "The Art of the Deal" came out — Donald Trump sat down for an interview with the late ABC News journalist Barbara Walters. Trump, now 79, was in his early forties at the time, and his first presidential run (a short-lived Reform Party campaign in 2000) was 13 years away. But Trump had a lot to say about politics, including foreign policy. And according to Salon's Heather Digby Parton, Trump revealed, during that interview almost 40 years ago, what he had in mind for Iran.

"Much has been said over the past few weeks about what motivated Donald Trump to go to war with Iran," Parton explains in an article published on April 7. "Since he has given more than half a dozen different explanations, and sometimes in the same day, there's no way of knowing for sure…. He has also thrown in his lot with Israel and certain Gulf states for ideological and financial reasons. In the case of Israel, there are also theological considerations at play. But Trump has another motive that he's never tried to hide. In fact, he's been saying it explicitly for the better part of 40 years: 'We should take the oil.'"

Trump is now calling for the United States to help itself to Iran's oil, which Parton notes, he proposed during the Walters interview 39 years ago.

"Trump himself has been circulating a 1987 interview he did with Barbara Walters," Parton observes. "He had given a speech before a rotary club in New Hampshire in which he posed the question, 'Why couldn't we go in and take over some of (Iran's) oil?' When Walters asked how he thought such a thing could be done — 'Would you send in the Marines, start a war?' — he replied, 'Let 'em have Iran, you take their oil.' And when she pressed him further, he made a recommendation. 'The next time Iran attacks this country, go in and grab one of their big oil installations and keep it.'"

Parton adds, "He offered the same argument during an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley in 2011."

Trump, the Salon journalist observes, is keeping his eye on other oil-producing countries as well, including Syria and Venezuela.

"His threats to annex Canada and Mexico are at least partially informed by the fact that they are oil-rich nations as well," Parton writes. "Interestingly, he has not been quite as aggressive about seizing the fields of oil powerhouses Russia and Saudi Arabia…. 'Just take the oil' was an insane idea to begin with, and it's why you don't make that guy at the end of the bar the president of the most powerful country in the world. And maybe it's also why the media shouldn't elevate loud-mouthed hype artists like Trump in the first place."

Retired Col. Cedric Leighton cautioned that President Donald Trump is running the risk of rallying the Iranian people against the United States with his latest threats to kill them all.

In a TruthSocial post on Tuesday morning, Trump announced, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Trump set a deadline for 8 p.m. EDT on Tuesday. Iran has called on young people in the country to make a human chain around the power plants that Trump wants to strike.

"Actually, [it] kind of plays into the hands of the Iranian regime because they see their struggle for existence, their revolutionary struggle for existence as being an existential struggle against the forces of the West and against the forces of non-Shia Islam. They are, of course, the representatives they see as being the representatives of Shia Islam. And they believe that their job is to not only maintain their regime, but to spread their revolution and to spread the ideas of Shia Islam," the colonel said.

When Trump puts his threats in the context of attacking not just military targets, but describing the death of entire civilization, he gets "into their sandbox, and ... makes this a conflict between civilizations. And that's a really dangerous area to be in."

He said he hopes that Trump doesn't make good on the threat because it will only rally people against the United States.

"So if you see large number of civilian casualties, that then creates a real problem for the U.S. We already have a public relations problem in the world," Leighton explained. "This is going to exacerbate that, and it's going to make it really difficult for us to pull ourselves back from this."

He cited a recent comment from Qatar's Foreign Minister, Majed Al Ansari, "We have been warning since 2023 that escalation, left unchecked, will get us into a situation where it cannot be controlled. And we are very close to that point. This is why we have been urging all parties to find a resolution out of this — to find a way of ending this war before it spirals out of control."

Leighton echoed the sentiment of all parties stepping back.

"Because if we don't, it not only exists the collapse of Iran potentially, which of course seems to be the goal of the administration's efforts, but it also risks the collapse of a lot of the Gulf economies in the Arab Gulf states. And that is something we don't want to have happen," he said.

President Donald Trump said that his administration is on the hunt for "a leaker," he said, who revealed that one person was rescued and another was still missing from a downed aircraft in Iran.

"And as you probably know, we didn't talk about the first one for an hour and then somebody leaked something, which we'll hopefully find that leaker. We're looking very hard to find that leaker and talked about, 'There's somebody missing.' They basically said that we have one and there's somebody missing," said Trump.

"A leaker leaked!" Trump exclaimed, noting that they revealed "national security" information.

According to Trump, his administration will put the journalists in jail if they don't turn over their source.

'Well, they [Iran] didn't know there was somebody missing until this leaker gave the information. So whoever it is, we think we'll be able to find it out because we're going to go to the media company that released it, and we're going to say 'national security,' give it up or go to jail," announced Trump. "And we know who and you know who we're talking about because some things you can't do because when they did that, all of a sudden the entire country of Iran knew that there was a pilot that was somewhere on their land that was fighting for his life."

"The person will go to jail if he doesn't say," added Trump.

Video footage from people on the ground in Iran was uploaded to social media showing the plane wreckage.

"Bit hard to follow Trump recounting of the rescue mission," foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen wrote on X. "Trump repeatedly talking about sand and contingencies."

"It's a F-15E, it is a two-person fighter jet. It doesn't take a leaker to realize there were two people to find," wrote "Task and Purpose" editor Nicholas Slayton on BlueSky.

Others wondered if Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could be the leaker. The secretary was found to be sending classified information via Signal to his lawyer, wife, a group of Trump officials and a reporter who was also quietly on the chat.

Another suggested that Trump could have been the leaker because he "can't keep his mouth shut."

Far-right MAGA Republican Joe Kent infuriated supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump's war against Iran when he resigned from his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center to express his opposition to the war — which he views as a betrayal of the America First agenda that Trump campaigned on in 2024.

According to Jewish Insider reporter Matthew Shea, Kent shared a social media post promoting a conspiracy theory that the U.S. was "attempting to kill the servicemember whose fighter jet was shot down over Iran over the weekend prior to him being rescued."

On Friday, April 3, a U.S. fighter jet was shot down by Iranian forces. The CIA and the U.S. military launched a rescue operation for the two pilots on board.

Shea, in a Jewish Insider article published on April 6, reports that an April 4 post from Drop Site News "cited a report by Tasnim News, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, claiming that the U.S. had 'lost hope' of recovering an airman whose jet was downed over Iran on Friday and was instead 'attempting to kill him.'"

"The post was then amplified by Kent with the message: 'Praying for the rescue of our downed pilot & the safe return of our Special Operators going in to get him back. [U.S. Air Force Pararescuemen and Combat Search and Rescue] Air crews are top notch,'" Shea reports. "The Iranian-state media claim reposted by Kent came a day before President Donald Trump announced, on Sunday, (April 5), that the lost crew member had been rescued following what he hailed as a 'daring' operation by U.S. forces to retrieve him — contradicting the claim that Washington had been attempting to bomb and kill the missing servicemember."

Kent ran for Congress via Washington State's 3rd Congressional District in 2022, defeating incumbent then-Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in a GOP primary but losing to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in the general election. Kent ran against Perez again in 2024 and lost to her a second time.

The Drop Site News post read, "Iranian state-linked Tasnim News, citing a military source, claims U.S. forces are bombing areas in southwest Iran where a missing pilot may be located, alleging Washington has 'lost hope' of recovery and is attempting to kill him. The source added: 'We will not announce whether the pilot is in our custody or not,' and accused the U.S. of 'not telling the full truth' about the first crew members U.S. claims was recovered."

U.S. President Donald Trump's war against Iran continued to escalate on Friday, April 3, when an American fighter jet was shot down by Iranian forces and an intense rescue operation for the pilots was launched. The Washington Post described the operation as a "high-stakes mission" and a "dramatic and politically perilous moment in the war."

In a "Fast Politics" video posted on YouTube on Sunday night, April 5, Never Trump conservative Rick Wilson and liberal journalist Molly Jong-Fast stressed that the attack on the fighter jet shows that the "TACO" approach to the war isn't working for Trump.

On Wall Street, the TACO meme (Trump Always Chickens Out) describes a pattern in which Trump makes belligerent threats but doesn't follow through.

Jong-Fast told Wilson, "When you start shooting down planes, that's when you have ground troops."

Jong-Fast got no argument from Wilson. The former GOP strategist told her, "The inevitable has now happened. And the Iranians have now shot down an American F-15-E Strike Eagle. Two crew members on the plane. Very effective, very good strike bomber aircraft. But they shot it down a relatively cheap heat-seeking missile from the ground."

The United States, Wilson added, has "now entered a phase of the war where it's not all one-sided."

Wilson told Jong-Fast, "They've put a lot of search and rescue operations into Iran now…. This will accelerate. These things always do…. It just escalates. And the problem is right now, we see a line of C-17 cargo planes flying from the U.S. into the Middle East. We're ratcheting up and up and up. The fake semi-TACO speech on Thursday night did not make the markets feel better."

Jong-Fast interjected, "In fact, it made the markets feel worse."

Wilson commented, "Have we reached the point where the TACO trick only works if he actually TACOs, you know? And he hasn't. He's still going all in on this war."

- YouTube www.youtube.com