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'Maximalist' Trump filling Oval Office with gold — but it may be cheap plastic

In 2025, President Donald Trump's makeover of the White House has taken on two different forms: (1) tearing down the historic East Wing to make way for a lavish new ballroom, and (2) redecorating parts of the West Wing in a distinctly Trumpian fashion.

The New York Times' Sam Sifton, in a newsletter published on Christmas Eve Day 2025, describes Trump's Oval Office makeover — which, the reporter notes, is so extensive that "he's almost out of wall space."

"He has made it an extravagant room," Sifton observes. "Gold is everywhere: on picture frames and gilded carvings, on seals and antiques and finials. The metal covers about a third of the walls…. Flags are abundant. There are five times as many as most other presidents displayed. A gold-framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hangs to the right of the Resolute Desk."

Sifton's newsletter is accompanied by two photos from the Times' Doug Mills — one showing Joe Biden in the Oval Office during his presidency, the other showing the Oval Office since Trump's return to the White House. And the latter has a lot more gold, which Sifton notes, is "a metaphor the president uses to telegraph his success."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Times, "He's a maximalist."

Some Trump critics, however, are alleging that the gold in the Oval Office may not be real gold.

Sifton explains, "All the gold — on those mirrors, on the frames of the portraits beside them, in the inlaid seal on the coffee table — has led to rumors that they're just cheap plastic, painted gold. Trump denies it, and a White House official told The Times that while the underlying materials are made of plaster or metal, they are covered in real gold leaf. I dug this detail: A craftsman from Florida regularly travels to the White House to gild parts of the Oval Office by hand, often when the president is away on weekends."

Read Sam Sifton's full New York Times newsletter is available at this link (subscription required).


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Plastic surgeons reveal which procedures men opt for in Trump’s DC

Plastic surgeons in Washington, D.C. are revealing which elective procedures men choose to appear “more virile” as “Mara-a-Lago face” sweeps Republican insiders in town to support President Donald Trump's agenda, Axios reports.

“Mar-a-Lago face,” which Salon’s Amanda Marcotte describes as “a combination of aggressive plastic surgery, fake tan and make-up spackled on so thick that it would crack — if the fillers hadn't already paralyzed their faces,” is gripping the greater-D.C. area as South Florida’s regional plastic surgery trends creep north.

“It's typical for people to get more work done in places like South Florida, where many MAGA faithfuls have roots,” Axios explains, citing D.C. plastic surgeon Anita Kulkarni.

According to plastic surgeon Navin Singh — who operates out of a clinic in McLean, VA — that regionality could explain why “male politico patients veer more Republican than Democrat,” Axios writes.

Plastic surgeon Troy Pittman, who Axios reports “works with a lot of Trump insiders,” said in contrast with the first Trump term, “[now] we’re seeing people who want to look like they had something done.”

According to Axios, “The ‘Palm Beach crowd’ is all-systems-go, says Pittman.”

The DC surgeon told Axios his male clients are want procedures that will make them look "younger" and "more virile and masculine.”

“On the menu,” Axios reports: “Botox, liposuction and eyelid rejuvenation.”

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Right-wing podcaster denies setting the fire that burned MAGA down

Semafor reports Texas plastic surgeon Keith Rose was “patient zero” for one of the worst conspiracy theories chewing MAGA to pieces in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

“In the hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10, his executive producer Andrew Kolvet took a call in the hospital where Kirk’s body still lay,” reports Semafor writers Ben Smith and Shelby Scott. “On the other end of the line was an occasional guest on the Charlie Kirk Show, Keith Rose, a Texas plastic surgeon and former military doctor who doubles as a geopolitical and intelligence commentator on conservative podcasts.

At the time of the call, Trump’s FBI had failed to identify or capture Kirk’s killer, so perhaps it should have been a surprise when Rose told Kolvet that two other conservative media figures, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, had actually been the assassin’s original targets, and could still be next.

Where was Rose getting his info? “He had picked [it] up,” reports Semafor. But that lack of sourcing did not stop Kolvet from sending the info along to Owens.

“I passed along the information to her because who wouldn’t, given the extraordinary circumstances and everything that had happened that day,” Kolvet said in a statement to Semafor.

What followed was a battalion of “paranoia and finger-pointing,” which “has consumed the American right,” reports Semafor.

“A death that, for a moment, seemed to unite the right instead cut rifts in the movement that have deepened since the Iran war began,” said Semafor. “And Rose’s call to a still-grieving Kolvet may be the match that lit a still-burning pyre of conspiracy theories and unfounded charges of an Israeli plot against the murdered conservative icon.”

Within weeks, Semafor said Owens was on her show and “amplifying claims about a potential Israeli government role in Kirk’s assassination,” claiming without evidence that assassin Tyler Robinson didn’t act alone.

“[Kolvet] called me from the hospital and said it was supposed to be me, and I was on his list, and so was Tucker Carlson,” Owens told Semafor. Kolvet didn’t tell her where he’d gotten the information, she added.

Kolvet later piled more kindling to the fire, claiming he’d met Rose in DC and “saw a written dossier further detailing Rose’s allegations, a document that Rose indicated would be passed on to President Donald Trump’s aides,” according to Semafor. But an administration source told Semafor: “The allegations made by this individual were handed to the administration, and every actionable lead was run down and could not be proven.”

Rose, himself, denies being the source of the lie, telling Semafor: “I have no idea what you are talking about” before clamming up and refusing to speak further.

But rumors burn bright in the MAGA word, and Kolvet spread Rose’s claim far and wide, making it “the first of a torrent of claims and counterclaims shared by conservative commentators after Kirk’s death.”

“The conspiracy theories got louder after Kolvet shared text messages in which Kirk had complained about pro-Israel donors with Joe Kent, who resigned as Trump’s counterterrorism adviser over Iran, and other fellow conservatives,” said Semafor.

Eventually the flame got high enough for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu having to openly deny Israel’s involvement in Kirk’s death.

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Pope officially declares war on 'Mar-a-Lago face': report

Political consultant and Letters from Leo editor Christopher Hale says Pope Leo XIV has had it with the Rubbermaid human masks and stretched skin that have drowned the White House in the years since President Donald Trump first slid down an escalator.

“In Washington, D.C., plastic surgeons report a surge in requests for what the industry now calls ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ — the sculpted, frozen, perpetually thirty-five-year-old look that has become a uniform among Trump’s inner circle,” reports Hale. “Severe jaws, razor-sharp cheekbones, lips that would make Mick Jagger blush. Axios reported the trend accelerating as Trump loyalists flooded the capital, bringing Palm Beach aesthetics with them. The look has become so recognizable that it functions as a political signal — a way of announcing, through your face, which team you play for.”

Now the Vatican has weighed in, and social media is on fire.

In a 48-page document titled Quo Vadis, Humanitas? [“Where Are You Going, Humanity?”] the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, with Pope Leo XIV’s explicit approval, has issued its sharpest critique of the cosmetic surgery culture turning D.C. into a legion of roving mannequins.

The commission is sounding the alarm on an insidious new “cult of the body,” marked by what it calls “the frantic pursuit of a perfect figure.” But the Vatican’s critique is more than just a light nip and tuck.

“It cuts deeper than aesthetics,” said Hale. “The theologians identify a painful paradox at the heart of the beauty-industrial complex: ‘The ideal body is exalted, sought after and cultivated, while the real body is not truly loved, being a source of limitations, fatigue, aging.’

The document slams the cult’s penchant for “reduc[ing] the body to biological material to be enhanced, transformed, and reshaped at will, with the dream of achieving living conditions that avoid pain, aging, and death.” The pursuit of surgical perfection amounts to an unhealthy obsession with “the attempt to escape what it means to be human.”

The opinion drew applause form many social media users and prompted The View’s Joy Behar to admit it was best not to invite the pope and the Kardashians to the same party. But Hale said the Vatican has identified a phenomenon that extends far beyond just Botox.

“Man is not an atom lost in a random universe,” the Vatican said, “but is a creature of God, to whom He wished to give an immortal soul and whom He has always loved.”

“In a culture where the president’s closest allies signal loyalty through matching cheekbones, where young men inject themselves with unregulated peptides to maximize their jawlines, and where aging is treated as a failure of self-discipline rather than a dimension of human experience, the Vatican’s message lands with unexpected force,” argued Hale. “Your wrinkles are not a deficiency.”

“God made you mortal, and that mortality is where the encounter with grace begins,” said Hale.

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Cocaine dealers slap Trump's face on drug packages

President Donald Trump likes to put his face on everything, but plonking it onto illicit drug packaging may not have been his first preference.

“A federal complaint unsealed in Massachusetts this week offers a vivid look at how President Donald Trump’s war on drugs has affected the people actually moving the product,” reports Daily Beast. “According to a DEA affidavit in the case, investigators seized about two kilograms of cocaine mailed from Puerto Rico to Worcester County earlier in February, each wrapped in a picture of the president and stamped with the letters ‘FAFO.’”

Agents listening in on a wiretap over the course of 18 months claim to have connected more than 10 kilograms of cocaine, in addition to fentanyl and methamphetamine, to a 12-person ring led by an accused drug trafficker.

“Inside the package, investigators found one brick-shaped object wrapped further in clear plastic, tape, dryer sheets, carbon paper, and black latex, with an exterior marking of a picture of President Donald J. Trump and the letters ‘FAFO,’ concealed inside a blue ‘Sequence’ game box inside the USPS package,” reports agents. “Under the wrapping, investigators found a solid white powdery substance stamped ‘FAFO,’ weighing 1092.5 gross grams. The substance field tested positive for the presence of cocaine. Investigators submitted the substance to the DEA laboratory for testing and that testing is pending.”

There is no telling if Trump’s image and his emblematic MAGA deer call of “f—— around and find out” has anything to do with the president’s strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean — the destruction of which have not been approved inside a courtroom or by judicial order before drawing deadly international fire.

Experts say the Trump administration has defied international law by deliberately killing boat occupants. And at least one of the destroyed boats was not even bound for U.S. shores.

Daily Beast points out that the accused drug trafficker and his accomplices tied to the presidential-looking drug packaging “are alleged to have made all of their shipments by USPS Priority Mail, which is not known to use boats to transport parcels from Puerto Rico to the mainland.”

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This Trump official’s 'bland' personality masks a dark agenda

Many of the MAGA firebrands President Donald Trump has appointed during his second presidency are known for being combative and highly performative, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, White House adviser Steven Miller, former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, and ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin, in contrast, is much more low-key.

But The New Republic's Liza Featherstone, in an article published on April 13, argues that Zeldin's "bland" personality doesn't make him any less "dangerous."

"Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin, reportedly being considered to replace Pam Bondi as attorney general, is not the most polarizing member of the Trump Administration — not by a long shot," Featherstone explains. "Yet he's one of the most dangerous. In contrast to the mutant plastic visage of Kristi Noem, you probably can't call up a visual mental image of Zeldin's eminently forgettable face. It's also hard to call to mind any memorable utterances by Zeldin. That's an achievement in a crowd that normally will not shut up."

Featherstone continues, "Consider, for example, the luridly reactionary and genocidal statements of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who, last month, called wartime rules of engagement 'stupid' and 'politically correct,' and recently reposted a video of the founding pastor of his church calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment. Or consider Steven Miller, who baselessly accused ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) murder victim Alex Pretti of being a terrorist — a charge he lobs against left-leaning protesters all the time. Or take Trump himself, who gleefully bragged that he was going to destroy Iranian civilization this week and that it wouldn't be a war crime because Iranians are 'animals.'"

According to Featherstone, however, Zeldin's more low-key personality "masks a truly extreme anti-environmental record at the EPA."

"Last Thursday, Zeldin appeared at a Heartland Institute conference of anti-environmental, pro-polluter lobbyists and activists who have been working for years to dismantle climate regulations," Featherstone writes. "Before Zeldin took office, this group would have been considered quite fringe…. He has cut billions of dollars from climate grants the Biden Administration had awarded, eviscerated pollution rules and enforcement capacity, and perhaps most significantly, wiped out the legal basis of much climate regulation: the 2009 endangerment finding, which says that greenhouse gases can be regulated because they imperil human life and health….. No other EPA head has ever done as much damage as he has, undoing climate progress and other environmental regulations."

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Today's richest people are painfully stupid

There's a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they're entitled to turn America's farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory AI "data centers." But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Okla., recently hit those puffed-up elites where they're most vulnerable: The funny bone.

Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates:
SUPPORT THESE
DATA CENTERS
Schools
Libraries
Bookstores

Arrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google and Meta are frontloading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amounts of rural land, water and energy to build and run their Orwellian empires. Yet, breathing the fumes of their own egos, the billionaires actually assumed that locals would welcome this dazzling bot wonderworld.

Bad assumption. Even in bastions of rural Republican rule, majorities are saying, "Uh ... Hell No!" Indeed, at least 48 data centers were stopped last year by coordinated local opposition and public fury has largely driven data center developers out of Illinois, Michigan, Oregon and Wisconsin. In Texas, corrupt Gov. Greg Abbott openly takes AI cash to push data centers, yet rural counties are rejecting them -- and the state's far-right Republican Party has now voted to oppose building more of them.

Even Wall Street money managers are blinking, for there's growing doubt that investors can get their money back. What's happening is that the billionaire hucksters have run head-first into the rock-solid political belief that The People get to decide our common destiny, not a handful of techno-scammers.

THE MAIN PROBLEM TODAY'S BILLIONAIRE "GENIUSES" HAVE IS THIS: THEY'RE STUPID

"Stand back," shout Silicon Valley's tech billionaires, "geniuses at work!"

They refer to themselves, of course, demanding that public officials, farmers, towns, environmentalists and all others get out of their way as they impose their massive AI data centers over rural America. "Our Big Money and Big Brains," they exclaim, "will remake nature and produce phenomenal wealth."

Haven't we heard this before? Yes ... and from these same uber-rich zealots. Just a decade ago, they declared they intended to replace farmland agriculture with a techno-marvel they called "vertical farms." Yes, instead of relying on messy, natural stuff like soil, food would henceforth be produced on sanitary plastic trays stacked to the ceilings of windowless factory warehouses controlled by computer networks. Big Tech investors like Jeff Bezos, Walmart and Japan's SoftBank plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into their "reinvention" of agriculture.

But what the geniuses actually produced was a bumper crop of bankruptcies, for the tech bros knew nothing about farming. Sure, displacing nature meant saving money to till the soil and feed the hogs. Still, those costs are nothing compared to the piles of capital required to pay for the ever-rising costs of corporate infrastructure, computers, utilities, executive salaries, administrative overhead ... and capital itself.

Worse, the clueless corporatizers were surprised to discover that consumers are not actually motivated to buy a head of lettuce just because it was "vertically farmed." So, with exorbitant costs and zero market appeal, the tech geniuses' ag revolution fizzled.
Let us all recall this as Bezos and his billionaire coterie now insist we must follow them into their Brave New World of artificial intelligence.

Trump's gaslighting on fuel prices falls flat

President Donald Trump tried to bicker and figuratively gaslight a reporter about the literal price of gas in America — and then changed the subject.

“How much longer will Americans continue to see high gas prices?” the reporter asked Trump on Thursday. To this the president replied with a lie.

“They’re not very high,” Trump said. “They’ve come down very much over the last few days.”

The reporter shot back that gas is “$4 a gallon still,” to which Trump replied that “that’s what ABC says. But if you look at the stock market it's up…”

"THIS EXCHANGE IS BIZARRE,” an X account posted in response to the video. “Is Trump flat out lying or just delusional? Or both?"

Another X user, Jackson Clinton, simply wrote “Let them eat cake,” while another was more loquacious, joking sarcastically that “oh good I thought I was paying way too much for gas. I'm so glad it is just fake news. I'll have to go to the gas station and get my money back and have them arrested for stealing.”

Trump has set a precedent for himself and others in the White House to distract from controversies by pointing to the stock market. Speaking to lawmakers earlier this year about Trump’s ties with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi infamously complained that Trump’s critics were not happy about the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently spiking to 50,000.

Dr. Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, told AlterNet last week that the Iran war is raising prices not just on gasoline, but on a wide range of essential products.

“I would guess that yes, destruction of Iranian (and some other) energy facilities in the Persian Gulf area will have at least a medium-term effect keeping prices for crude oil and chemical fertilizer high, and that in turn means gasoline prices may come down only slowly,” Gresser told AlterNet. “Same for other petroleum-based products such as plastics, skin creams, and so on. The high potential of conflict also adds risk premiums to shipping and other costs.”

He concluded, “Longer-term, lots of open questions. One is whether the administration will really concede that Iran has a right to close the Strait of Hormuz and assess tolls on shipping passing through it. That would make the smaller Gulf monarchies and to some extent Iraq reliant on Iranian good will for all of their exports. Likewise, Asian countries are the main buyers of Persian Gulf energy, and their supplies would be much less secure.”

White House spokesperson Kush Desai echoed Trump’s own assertion that the economy is in great shape.

“President Trump has been clear about short-term disruptions as a result of Operation Epic Fury, and the Administration went into this military engagement with a plan to mitigate these disruptions to America’s long-term economic resurgence," Desai told AlterNet. "As energy markets begin to stabilize, historic tax refund checks hit the mail, and the rest of the Trump administration’s pro-growth agenda continues taking effect, Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come.”

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The slopaganda wars: How Trump is weaponizing AI-generated chaos

In early March, a week after the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the White House posted a video of real American attacks mixed with clips from popular movies, television series, video games and anime.

Iran and its sympathisers responded to the strikes by flooding social media with outdated war footage allegedly from the current conflict alongside AI-generated content depicting attacks on Tel Aviv and US bases in the Persian Gulf.

More recently, viral video clips reportedly created by a team of Iranians depict Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Satan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Pete Hegseth, Ayatollah Khamenei, and others as Lego figurines.

Welcome to the brave new world of slopaganda.

The rise of slopaganda

Late last year, in a paper published in Filisofiska Notiser, we coined the portmanteau “slopaganda” to refer to AI-generated slop that serves propagandistic purposes.

By propaganda we mean communication intended to manipulate beliefs, emotions, attention, memory and other cognitive and affective processes to achieve political ends. Add generative artificial intelligence and the result is slopaganda.

The slopaganda situation has since become far worse than we expected.

In October 2025, US President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video depicting himself piloting a fighter jet while wearing a crown and dumping faeces on American protesters. More recently, he posted an AI-generated video envisaging his presidential library as an enormous gaudy skyscraper, complete with a golden elevator.

Lego-themed Iran-created slopaganda is just the latest example. The material isn’t just videos. It can also be images, text, or whatever else AI can generate.

How slopaganda slips through our defenses

What is the point of all this slopaganda? We have several answers so far.

First, through repeated exposure in both legacy and social media, slopaganda can penetrate our usual mental defences. It works when it is attention-grabbing, emotionally arresting – typically in a negative way – and delivered to a distracted audience, such as people scrolling social media or switching between browser tabs.

Second, it is a very effective way of diluting the epistemic environment – the world of what we think we know – with falsehoods and half-truths. As philosophers have argued, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools can be machines for bullshit, in the sense of content that is indifferent to truth.

Slopaganda can be understood as a special kind of AI bullshit, but its unique features become clearer when we look at its use in campaigns such as the Iranian Lego videos.

This is not just bullshit. No one is misled into thinking Trump can pilot an F-16 and drop faeces out of it. No one (we hope) believes plastic Trump Lego figurines are in cahoots with a plastic Satan figurine.

Rather than aiming for accuracy, the slopaganda is expressive and emblematic of feelings and emotions, and meant to create an association. The intended linkages are something like Satan is associated with Trump while the United States is associated with evil, and so on.

What slopaganda means for shared truth

A third point is that some slopaganda is indeed misleading. This may be by design, or because a joke or trolling escapes its intended context and is misunderstood as serious – a phenomenon scholars call “context collapse”. Misleading slopaganda, including deepfakes, can be generated quickly during conflicts, crises and emergencies, when people want information but authoritative sources are scarce.

Once misleading information or a particular association enters someone’s mind, it can be hard to shake. Because slopaganda can reach huge audiences, even a small misleading effect in the general population may have significant consequences. State actors, corporations, and private individuals can potentially influence group beliefs and decisions, including election results, protest movements, or general sentiment about an unpopular war.

Fourth, the prevalence of slopaganda may make us doubt everything else. People will no doubt become better at spotting this kind of material, but they will also become more likely to misidentify authentic content as slop. As a result, public trust in genuinely trustworthy individuals and institutions may also fall.

When this occurs, the overall effect is likely to be a general lowering of public trust in genuinely trustworthy individuals and institutions, leading to a kind of nihilistic doubt in really knowing anything.

When it’s hard or impossible to identify trustworthy sources, you can choose to believe whatever you find comforting, invigorating or infuriating. In increasingly polarised societies struggling with interlocking economic, political, military and environmental crises, the breakdown of shared sources of truth will only make things worse.

3 ways to stave off slopagandapocalypse

What can be done about the slopaganda shitstorm? In our paper, we discuss interventions at three different levels.

First, individuals can become more digitally literate, for instance by looking for telltale signs of AI in text, images and video. They can also learn to check sources rather than merely glancing at headlines and other content, as well as to block sources that routinely spread slopaganda, rather than attempting to evaluate each piece of content in a vacuum. This will help them avoid falling for slopaganda while still trusting authentic sources of news and other information.

Second, industry and regulators can implement technological fixes to watermark AI-generated content. Some content may even need to be removed from platforms where people see news and other important information.

Third, large tech companies such as OpenAI, Google and X can be held accountable for what they have made. This could be done through taxation and other interventions to fund both regulatory efforts and education in digital literacy.

Slopaganda is probably here to stay. But with sufficient foresight and courage, we may still be able to adapt to it – and even control it.The Conversation

Mark Alfano, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Macquarie University and Michał Klincewicz, Assistant Professor, Department of Computational Cognitive Science, Tilburg University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Trump floods social media with political attacks in 12-hour posting marathon

President Donald Trump unleashed a marathon posting session on his Truth Social platform, publishing 19 messages across a 12-hour span that targeted both domestic political adversaries and Iranian leadership while addressing energy policy and foreign affairs.

As the Daily Beast notes, the posting blitz began at approximately 4 p.m. with an announcement regarding an extension of the ceasefire agreement with Iran. Trump's focus quickly shifted to Iranian economic conditions and the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway through which approximately one-third of global seaborne traded oil passes.

At 8:36 p.m., Trump posted: "Iran doesn't want the Strait of Hormuz closed, they want it open so they can make $500 Million Dollars a day," before elaborating on his position regarding U.S. military presence in the region. He continued: "People approached me four days ago, saying, 'Sir, Iran wants to open up the Strait, immediately.' But if we do that, there can never be a Deal with Iran, unless we blow up the rest of their Country, their leaders included!"

The president's social media activity also encompassed domestic policy matters. Trump celebrated a state's decision to maintain two coal-fired power plants in operation, characterizing environmental concerns as misguided. He wrote: "Radical Left Lunatics wanted to get rid of these wonderful Plants in favor of WIND FARMS, which kill the birds, and are both costly and ineffective. We will never allow that to happen!"

Trump interspersed his posts with links to articles from The Washington Post and Just The News, including a favorable opinion piece on regional economic performance, pieces addressing investigations into alleged election irregularities, and fraud allegations against the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Between 11:41 p.m. and 12:01 a.m., Trump published 10 posts in rapid succession. He reiterated his assessment of Iran's financial situation, posting: "Iran is collapsing financially! They want the Strait of Hormuz opened immediately- Starving for cash! Losing 500 Million Dollars a day. Military and Police complaining that they are not getting paid. SOS!!!"

During this late-night period, Trump shared multiple videos featuring commentary from political allies and media figures. In one video, Trump Advisory Board Member Jason Meister appeared making claims regarding a former president, while in another, a plastic surgeon offered commentary on the administration's approach to Iranian women's issues during a media segment.

Trump continued amplifying supporter commentary by reposting his own messages with added reactions from followers, including characterizations of presidential foreign policy strategy.

His final post, published shortly after midnight, featured video commentary from Jim Hanson, chief strategist for the Middle East Forum, discussing U.S. foreign policy outcomes during a cable news appearance. Trump wrote: "Great job of explaining USA 'winning' by Jim Hanson of 'Middle East Forum' on Jesse Watters Primetime!"

This posting activity mirrors a similar late-night social media session from the previous week, during which Trump directed criticism toward religious and international organization leadership in posts published around midnight, while also sharing news articles and supportive commentary from other users.

In that earlier session, Trump wrote: "Will someone please tell Pope Leo that Iran has killed at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protesters in the last two months, and that for Iran to have a Nuclear Bomb is absolutely unacceptable," concluding with "AMERICA IS BACK!!!"

The White House has confirmed that Trump personally manages his Truth Social account. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated: "If you see it on Truth Social, you know it's directly from President Trump. That's the beauty of this president and his transparency in his relaying this administration's policies to all of you and to the rest of the world."

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Conservative wallops Trump’s 'cretinous worms'

American Conservative Managing Editor Jude Russo has no patience for President Donald Trump or his lieutenants proposing endless U.S. intervention in Iran for the foreseeable future. He also has no love for their deft use of labels to deny the obvious.

“Let’s all give a hand for Marco Rubio, secretary of state, favored champion of the White House, and all-around cretinous worm,” said Russo. “The Amazing Plastic Man — the adjective refers to his flexible principles, not his increasingly inflexible face — was hitting the airwaves this Monday morning to articulate the latest version of what the Trump administration regards as its war aims. Excuse me, military operation aims; President Donald Trump has figured out the One Weird Trick around constitutional checks on executive war powers. You just have to use the right words!”

“Well, the war is — this operation, okay — and that’s what this is — is about very specific objectives,” Rubio told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Rubio was there to “sneer” away the claim that Trump has no objectives in the war, by spelling out the objectives of destroying Iran’s navy and its missile launching capabilities, all to derail the nation’s nuclear capabilities.

“I assume Rubio would physically sneer, but for the Botox,” said Russo, while adding that Rubio’s arguments are no less sensible. “We’ll give Trump, Marco, Pete, and the boys two gold stars apiece for destroying the Iranian air force and navy,” said Russo, though there wasn’t much to destroy in the first place.

“[B]ut diminishing the Iranian missile launch capacity — well, mixed bag,” Russo said.

Launch volume may be down, but plenty is still getting through and causing problems as Israel interceptor stores are running down. Putting an end to Iranian missile factories is a lost cause, and Trump and friends likely know it.

“These programs will be maintained and expanded after the war,” said Russo, and keeping them down will be an endless task.

“Among many worrying points about this military operation, this is one of the worst: We have spent a spectacular number of resources in the past month, but we may still well be in the position of ‘mowing the grass,’ of having to return to degrade rebuilt Iranian capacities again. This is a very expensive, politically difficult way of doing business; a quagmire in installments is no less of a quagmire,” said Russo.

And then there is the question of the Strait of Hormuz.

“The strait was open when the war started, and it is all but closed now,” said Russo, pointing out that Trump’s Secretary of Treasury had the nerve to tell Fox News that the number of ships going through the Hormuz is increasing — as if Iran allowing toll-paying ally nations’ ships through the strait was some kind of U.S. victory.

There is no “settled solution” to Hormuz, said Russo, so Trump and his helpers are already setting “the rhetorical groundwork” future intervention. This means “more grass-mowing, or weedwhacking or whatever yardwork-based analogy you prefer,” said Russo.

“Stupendously expensive and destructive military operations every six to 18 months for the foreseeable future does not seem like an appreciably better outcome than the Bush-era occupations,” Russo said. “Indeed, I’d go so far as to describe such a state as ‘forever war.’ As has always been the case, any durable solution will be political and diplomatic — but that’s not this administration’s strong suit, is it?

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