In addition to his work as a journalist, British reporter Ben Judah is known for his work in the U.K. government — where he served as a special adviser to David Lammy in the Foreign Office. And in an article published by the i Paper in the UK on March 6, Judah recalls his initial reaction after learning that U.S. President Donald Trump had chosen real estate mogul Steve Witkoff as a special envoy to the Middle East.

"Had Trump really appointed some real estate pal of his to wrap up the Gaza War?," Judah remembers. "There was a mixture of shock and scorn in the ranks at how this could possibly have come about. A few old hands predicted his time in diplomacy would be a failure. He'd fail to launch. But Witkoff kept on rising, as the Democrats levelled accusations he sought to enrich himself and the Trump family with fabulous real estate deals in Russia, even Iran, once he'd landed those prize-winning peace deals."

Judah recalls that native New Yorker Witkoff was quite "globalized" when Trump appointed him yet is "very different from a diplomat" in his outlook.

Witkoff, Judah argues, is very much a reflection of the second Trump Administration —which, he warns, is showing a total disregard for diplomacy during its war against Iran.

"The fact is that Trump is not running an administration but a court — where the closeness and confidence of the king is key," Judah laments. "A court where (Israeli Prime Minister) Bibi Netanyahu would turn out to be the greatest courtier. The rise of Witkoff was a story of taking on more and more for the boss. The truth is, in politics, that's not always a good thing. Because when it goes wrong, it's suddenly all on you. There was no grand deal to trumpet for Trump on Fox this week."

Judah continues, "Instead, Witkoff marched through making a series of nuclear justifications that will be pored over by Democrats, historians and journalists like Colin Powell’s at the United Nations on the eve of the Iraq War. Whatever happens now, Witkoff's rise will never end at a Nobel gala night in Oslo. Instead his name will forever be linked to a cataclysmic failure of diplomacy. Then again, maybe it was always thus. No crying in the casino, as they say. One's rise and success can easily turn into catastrophic disaster, with you owning the mess, if you play at the highest stakes on the world stage."

The global diplomatic goals of the U.S. used to be handled by a vast corps of skilled professionals, but under Trump, virtually all overseas goals are in the hands of one "witless" envoy, as James Ball wrote for The i Paper, possibly because he has a background "almost identical" to the president's.

Ball broke down Steve Witkoff's unlikely and alarming ascent in a scathing analysis from Wednesday. Initially chosen to oversee an Israeli ceasefire deal in Gaza, he was later upgraded to overseeing all missions in the Middle East, including brokering a deal to defuse tensions with Iran.

Now, he is also handling talks to end the years-long war between Russia and Ukraine. This high-stakes job has seen him make many alarming breaks from standard diplomatic procedures, such as meeting solo with Russian President Vladimir Putin and insisting that he trusts the Kremlin's English interpreters. These decisions overwhelmingly give Russia an upper hand, something Witkoff might not mind, Ball noted, as he has previously praised Putin and said that he does not "regard him as a bad guy."

"Is he amoral, or just incompetent?" Ball asked. "Usually, sensitive diplomatic negotiations are left to people with huge experience of the areas in which they operate. Typically, the lead negotiator has lived and worked in the region for decades, speaks the relevant languages, and has relationships with key power brokers in the various factions involved. They know the history, the resentments, the red lines. The hope is they can leverage that into the patient drudgework of diplomacy, dragging often reluctant parties over the line to a deal none of them will love, but that they can all live with."

Witkoff cannot meet that standard for all the missions he has been tasked with, Ball argued, because "No one on the planet has intimate experience of Israel, Gaza, Iran, Russia and Ukraine." That matter is made by the fact that the billionaire has had no diplomatic experience at all prior to his appointment as Trump's "Special Envoy for Peace Missions." The president, Ball suggested, seemed to pick him because of their strikingly similar professional backgrounds.

"His background is almost identical to Trump’s – Witkoff is a billionaire who made his money through real estate deals," Ball explained. "His portfolio is even more U.S.-focused than the President’s, and the handful of major deals his company closed outside the U.S. were in London. Witkoff knows the world of US real estate, and little else."

With "the witless Witkoff" now handling the Russia-Ukraine peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, Ball wrote that Trump has made him all of Europe's problem, with no regard for the consequences of his failure.

"It is Ukrainians first, and then Europeans, who will pay with their lives if Witkoff screws up," Ball wrote. "Americans will sit a continent away and pretend it’s not their problem if it blows up in their faces."

President Donald Trump is desperate for an off-ramp to escape the deadly and messy war he started with Iran, but according to a new analysis from MS NOW, his "bafflingly incoherent" strategy means that achieving peace may not be possible anytime soon.

Writing for MS NOW on Tuesday, reporter Zeeshan Aleem broke down Trump's dubious claim from Monday that "productive" peace talks were underway with Iranian leaders, something that Iran itself denied. In response, Trump insisted that his special diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had been in touch with an official from Iran, whom he called "the man who I believe is the most respected and the leader," a description vague enough that it could refer to anyone, Aleem argued.

This contradicted Trump's claim from just days earlier, when he said that military strikes had wiped out too much of Iran's leadership for peace talks, stating, "we have nobody to talk to — and you know what? We like it that way."

The reporter noted that there is precedent for Trump claiming that negotiations are underway while the other party denies them. Last year, he claimed that trade talks were taking place with China, an assertion that Beijing promptly shot down. Then, as now, Trump had a major interest in soothing economic instability caused by his reckless policies, Aleem argued, causing him to invent a potential off-ramp.

The likelihood that he will succeed in de-escalating the ongoing Iran war is low, however, due to the haphazard manner in which he has conducted the conflict and the shifting, contradictory goals he has put forward.

"In a remarkable feat of self-sabotage, Trump has manufactured a bona fide political crisis for himself by underestimating Iran’s response to U.S. airstrikes," Aleem wrote. "He is now feeling the heat from soaring gas prices. It is plausible that Trump is trying to invent an off-ramp after cornering himself impulsively."

He continued: "More broadly, Trump’s Iran policy is bafflingly incoherent. It makes little sense to pursue peace negotiations with a country at the exact same time as pursuing a strategy of decapitation and regime change. And given the fact that Trump has already blown up talks with Tehran not just once but twice, with airstrikes in the past year, Iran has little incentive to ever take Trump’s word in future negotiations."

President Donald Trump is a “practical primitive” as he wages war against Iran, a veteran journalist warned on Saturday — and the world is not catching up to that fact.

“All of the many textbook reasons for war—historical, military, political, economic, defensive or aggressive—are less than relevant because he has only limited awareness of them,” journalist Michael Wolff wrote in The Daily Beast regarding Trump’s foreign policy.

“What any world leader, ally, enemy, diplomatic expert, pundit, or political pro thinks about war is absent—because it’s Trump. Sometimes he even seems to have an amount of self-awareness about this strange vacuum, proudly proclaiming that nobody knows what he’s going to do because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, which gives him quite an advantage over everybody else.”

He added, “Beware the crazy man.”

Wolff pointed out that, although foreign policy commentators keep trying to analyze Trump’s motives, “the world has simply never faced this kind of situation. All the mandarins, bureaucrats, and consultants in it, who have made their careers on greater and greater spreadsheets of complexity, are face-to-face with a practical primitive.”

Within this context, the only consistent theme in Trump’s foreign policy is that he wishes to financially profit from it. To illustrate this point, Wolff pointed to the growing influence of Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

“Jared was the guy to whom Trump farmed out most of the details, deal-making, and general foreign-policy mindshare—all things that bore the president—during the first administration,” Wolff wrote. “It was Kushner’s invitation that made MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Trump’s first foreign visitor to the White House. After that, Persian Gulf wealth became a consistent focus. The UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, were the crescent of opportunity.

Wolff added, “And while Trump was personally p------ off that his son-in-law snagged a $2 billion payoff from the Saudis without him benefiting, it also fortified his acumen in Trump’s eyes.”

Even though Trump describes Kushner’s and investment partner Steve Witkoff’s involvement in the Middle East as a “portfolio,” Wolff speculated that in Trump’s mind this is as much a financial portfolio as a diplomatic one.

“‘Jared can really work the Arabs. They like Jews to handle the money,’” Wolff quoted Trump as saying, adding that he was “likely unaware of his head-smacking antisemitism.”

Wolff concluded, “Always, the best way to understand Trump is to focus on what’s in it for him. In any endeavor, however misguided and seemingly inexplicable, there will be an eye-on-the prize calculation of how he personally can come out ahead. His world, random, disorganized, undisciplined, mercurial, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, has, over decades, always had a consistent focus on his piece of the pie.”

Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a conversation in which two subjects named Kushner as the Trump administration’s made decision-maker for Iran and helping Trump develop Middle Eastern policy. It also found that Trump worked closely with Kushner and Witkoff on other foreign policy issues; Witkoff, for example, was put in charge of dealing with the Russia-Ukraine war. Yet outsiders in the Republican Party are worried that the Iran war, as pushed by an erratic Trump and his advisers, will ultimately hurt the party politically.

“The longer this goes on, the worse it is politically, full stop,” Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett, who worked for Trump during his first term, told The Wall Street Journal.

A bombshell Saturday report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family secretly backed a massive $500 million investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture months before the Trump administration gave the United Arab Emirates access to highly sensitive artificial intelligence chip technology.

According to the Journal’s sources, lieutenants of Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal in early 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Documents reviewed by the Journal showed that the buyers in the deal agreed to “pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities,” while “at least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with” the Witkoff family.

Weeks after green lighting the investment into the Trump crypto venture, Tahnoon met directly with President Donald Trump and Witkoff in the White House, where he reportedly expressed interest in working with the US on AI-related technology.

Two months after this, the Journal noted, “the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”

Tahnoon in the past had tried to get US officials to give the UAE access to the chips, but was rebuffed on concerns that the cutting-edge technology could be passed along to top US geopolitical rival China, wrote the Journal.

Many observers expressed shock at the Journal’s report, with some critics saying that it showed Trump and his associates were engaging in a criminal bribery scheme.

“This was a bribe,” wrote Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, in a social media post. “UAE royals gave the Trump family $500 million, and Trump, in his presidential capacity, gave them access to tightly guarded American AI chips. The most powerful person on the planet, also happens to be the most shamelessly corrupt.”

Jesse Eisinger, reporter and editor at ProPublica, argued that the Abu Dhabi investment into the Trump cypto firm “should rank among the greatest US scandals ever.”

Democratic strategist David Axelrod also said that the scope of the Trump crypto investment scandal was historic in nature.

“In any other time or presidency, this story... would be an earthquake of a scandal,” he wrote. “The size, scope and implications of it are unprecedented and mind-boggling.”

Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America,” struggled to wrap his head around the scale of corruption on display.

“How do you add up the cost of corruption this massive?” he wondered. “It’s not just that Trump is selling advanced AI tech to the highest bidder, national security be damned. Its that he’s tapped that doofus Steve Witkoff as an international emissary so his son Zach Witkoff can mop up bribes.”

Former Rep. Tom Malinkowski (D-NJ) warned the Trump and his associates that they could wind up paying a severe price for their deal with the UAE.

“If a future administration finds that such payments to the Trump family were acts of corruption,” he wrote, “these people could be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, and the assets in the US could potentially be frozen.”

President Donald Trump attacked Iran early Saturday morning, striking targets that they intend to continue for several days. He also encouraged citizens to rise up against their government. Other than that, it appears there is no real plan from the U.S.

Publications across the internet matched one major messasge on Saturday afternoon, asking what the plan is.

"'Massive' War Launched by a Man With No Plan. Again," the Mother Jones headline by David Corn reads. "Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People," The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum headlined her piece. Even the LGBTQ+ publication The Advocate reported on the voices of those "who say the operation was undertaken without congressional authorization and without a plan for what comes next." Even the right-leaning Sky News called the war "a gamble."

In the latter, the analysis concluded, "The history of wars in the Middle East shows that no plan by either side survives first contact with the enemy."

The Advocate cited Pete Buttigieg, a Navy lieutenant who served in the War in Afghanistan.

“The President has launched our nation and our great military into a war of choice, risking American lives and resources, ignoring American law, and endangering our allies and partners,” the former transportation secretary wrote Saturday on Bluesky. “It does nothing to help with the urgent problems here at home that Americans face every day.”

“This nation learned the hard way that an unnecessary war, with no plan for what comes next, can lead to years of chaos and put America in still greater danger," he added in a seperate post.

"What Trump did not say was that he had a plan," Corn wrote for MoJo. "It’s easy for an American president to bomb a country. It’s much tougher to figure out what to do in the aftermath."

He noted that it has been an ongoing problem for Trump, who never has a plan for anything. Such was the case when Trump promised he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia in 24 hours. He even bragged that he likely could do it before he even took office on Jan. 20, 2025. More than a year later, the war continues.

"He had no plan to do so," Corn wrote.

Trump has been fighting that problem for years. In his first administration, the GOP came inches away from repealing the Affordable Care Act, a huge policy promise to "repeal and replace Obamacare." Their problem is that there was no plan to replace it with.

There was a running joke in the first administration that every week was "Infrastructure Week," part of Trump's ongoing effort to usher in a major nationwide infrastructure project to repair the country's aging infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, internet, plumbing, and sewage systems. The White House would announce "Infrastructure Week," and continue identifying problems, but not proposing any plans to fix it.

"The mere act of bombing Iran will not by itself create a stable regime," Applebaum wrote for The Atlantic.

This problem has already plagued Trump for weeks, she explained.

"On at least eight occasions during Iran’s nationwide uprising in early January, Trump encouraged Iranians to 'take over their institutions' and promised that American help was 'on its way.' But just last month, days after the Iranian regime massacred thousands of its own citizens, President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, sent out the opposite message," Applebaum said.

Witkoff suggested that Iran needed “a deal that ought to happen.” Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance was just as clueless, saying that America’s interests in Iran are limited.

“If the Iranian people want to overthrow the regime, that’s up to the Iranian people,” Vance told reporters. “What we’re focused on right now is the fact that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

She closed by saying that everyone is behind a "stable, law-abiding Iran," in the hopes that it "will help build a stable, law-abiding Middle East."

To do that, however, she wrote that "Iran needs not a new dictatorship but self-determination and a pluralist government that respects basic rights. Right now, the Trump administration is not trying to build one."

President Donald Trump’s top adviser Steve Bannon is ensnared in a cryptocurrency scandal — although in Bannon’s case, the controversy comes with a literally profane twist.

A Missouri investor named Andrew Barr is suing Bannon over a failed cryptocoin called “F—— Joe Biden” (FJB), according to The Bulwark. Barr alleges that he lost almost $59,000 investing in the FJB coin and is seeking to sue Bannon in a class action suit that would also include MAGA bigwigs like political operative Boris Epshteyn. Barr also claims that Bannon and the other FJB executives demanded an unusually high 8 percent fee on transactions on the grounds that 5 percent would go to charitable donations like veterans’ care, but has not lived up to that promise.

The FJB coin, which was supposedly going to one day power an “uncancelable” economy under Trump, plummeted in value under Bannon’s and Epshteyn’s management. The lawsuit also alleges that $2.7 million in value intended to go to charity or marketing has instead vanished unaccounted for. Despite enlisting top MAGA figures like Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec to promote the coin, the FJB coin never became a lucrative venture. Finally the lawsuit points to public discussions among FJB executives which suggest they were aware something was amiss with their financial product.

“Top coin administrator Sarah Abdul and programmer Chase Bailey offered their lament over an alleged $120,000 payment from FJB to Epshteyn’s friends for lackluster services,” The Bulwark reported regarding a Discord conversation among FJB executives. “But, they concluded, it was ‘drops in the bucket’ compared to more serious financial mismanagement, which they didn’t spell out. Abdul told Bailey the management of the coin’s money was ‘worse than I ever imagined,’ according to the lawsuit.”

The Bulwark quoted Bailey as replying, “This looks sooooo neglegent [sic].”

This is not the first time Trump and his administration’s figures have gotten involved in cryptocurrency scandals. The Abu Dhabi royal family invested $500 million in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency coin; later, after Trump became president, the United Arab Emirates received access to highly sensitive AI technology. The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal involved “pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities” and at the same time “at least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with” the family of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. Democratic strategist David Axelrod described this as “an earthquake of a scandal” while Protect Democracy director Ian Bassin commented “amazingly, this has all but fallen out of the news."

In addition to Trump himself, Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche was accused by the ethics watchdog Campaign Legal Center of owning at least $159,000 in cryptocurrency assets when he ordered an end to all investigations into cryptocurrency companies. Blanche had previously signed an ethics agreement promising to dump his cryptocurrency holdings within 90 days of being confirmed, but instead did not divest until more than a month after his cryptocurrency memo. Even then he did so transferring them to his adult children and a grandchild, which though legal skirts the spirit of the law.

Despite the Trump administration’s abundant promises that cryptocurrency would lead to immense profits, the market has fallen more than 50 percent since its October peak with no end in sight.

“I’ve never seen people so dispirited about the crypto industry before, even at the lowest lows," Nic Carter, founding partner of the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures, told Politico. "Psychologically, this feels really hard for people to handle.”

Carter later added, “The rapture didn’t happen, we’re just stuck here on Earth and it sucks.”

Few circumstances are more dangerous to American and world security than an American president -- specifically, Donald J. Trump -- who lies brazenly to the public in time of war. At a moment when his assault on Iran has jeopardized the global economy in a way not seen for four decades, Trump appears to be prevaricating about his government's "very good talks" with the regime in Tehran.

It is reassuring that Trump postponed his mad threat of military strikes on Iran's energy infrastructure. It is not reassuring that Iranian officials immediately denied that they are engaged in any contacts, let alone negotiations, with the Trump White House. And while it isn't impossible that he has authorized some kind of contacts with the Iranians, who are also prone to mendacity, there is little reason to believe him until a diplomatic process emerges.

Given the history of falsehoods leading up to the first strike on Iran and the fog of contradictory justifications for this war of choice, White House deception would hardly be surprising. After so gravely disrupting the world's energy supply lines, at a cost of more than a dozen American troops, thousands of innocent Iranian lives, and countless billions of dollars -- with no sign of achieving the vague and ever-changing objectives of this mission -- Trump suddenly seems desperate for an exit.

Whatever bluster he and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, may emit, they have so far failed to eliminate Iran as a military threat to the Middle East, let alone accomplished the "regime change" that has long been sought by Israel, its only ally in this venture.

They have failed as well to secure the highly enriched uranium at bombed Iranian sites, and they have likewise failed to protect the critical shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.

All this bloody chaos came to pass because, from the beginning, Trump remained focused on trashing Barack Obama, whose multilateral effort to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions had at least forestalled them for a decade. By appointing the greedy but feckless and utterly inexperienced team of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to seek a new settlement with Iran, he ensured failure.

Many observers suspect that was his aim -- or at least Kushner's aim -- all along, because that was what the far-right Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu wanted.

None of that has transpired as the war criminal Netanyahu and his Washington cronies would have predicted -- indeed, as they did predict at the outset of this conflict. Despite the massive military and leadership losses sustained by the Iranians, they appear to have prepared far more carefully for this fight than their counterparts in the Trump White House and therefore are prepared to continue an asymmetric battle that the U.S. president wants to abandon.

After the killing of his father, comrades and immediate family, Iran's supreme leader probably won't make it easy for Trump to declare victory and move on. What is the basis for ceasefire talks with an adversary who began bombing while engaged in the last round of negotiations, even as observers indicated that agreement was near? Without that bare minimum of honor and trust, it is hard to imagine how that would work.

Had Trump not trashed America's diplomatic relations with its traditional allies, we might have called upon more trusted European or Asian friends to broker an exit deal. They have no reason to trust us anymore or to put their own credibility on the line -- except that they too will suffer as long as this fiasco continues and worsens. We will be lucky if their enlightened self-interest can help lift us out of Trump's latest catastrophe.