President Donald Trump is, by his own repeated admissions, first and foremost a businessman. Even after entering the rarified echelons of hegemonic decision-making, he often touts his track record as a corporate wheeler-dealer as proof he is prepared for the oceanic pressures of managing a geopolitical superpower.

Now, as commander in chief, Trump has seemingly merged the political with the profitable, commandeering the Oval Office for his own financial interests. From teasing tariffs to raking in royalties, these are the ways the president has used the White House to boost his bank account.

Cryptocurrency

Of all the various Trump-linked business projects operating concurrently with the president’s administration, “none” pose a conflict of interest that can “compare to those that have emerged since the birth” of cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial, said The New York Times. Trump is now “not only a major crypto dealer” but one of the industry’s “top policy makers,” whose family-owned foray into digital currency is “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy.”

During the first year of his second term, Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, thereby establishing federal regulations that the “industry had sought around stablecoins, a kind of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar,” said Time Magazine. “Earlier that year,” Trump launched USD1, “his own stablecoin business.”

World Liberty also offers “governance tokens,” which can be purchased to offer owners “certain voting rights in its business, though not equity stakes,” The Associated Press said. The result? “Hundreds of millions of dollars” for Trump and his family from his World Liberty ownership and a “separate side deal allowing them a cut of these sales.”

Real estate development

You can take the president out of the cutthroat world of elite property deals, but you can’t take the elite property deals out of the president. At least that is how Trump seems to have operated since taking office, with his geopolitical responsibilities as president often overlapping with international development deals being pursued in his corporate name.

While the eponymous Trump Organization “did zero deals in foreign countries” during the first Trump term, it has done at least eight in his second, “all ostensibly complying with the Trump Organization’s self-imposed rule not to do business directly with foreign governments,” said the AP. But “authoritarian” and one-party states “rarely take a hands-off approach” when it comes to big business deals — “especially when the business belongs to a sitting president.”

The President “continues to profit” from his partnership with a “major Saudi developer with a history of close ties to the royal family,” said The New Yorker. This past winter, the Trump organization began “licensing its name” for the development of a “new golf club, a luxury hotel and a number of mansions in Diriyah, near Riyadh.” It has also “sold the use of the President’s name for a Trump Plaza development in Jeddah.”

Tariffs

In his second term, Trump has centered tariffs as a load-bearing policy of his entire administration. But to “truly understand why Donald Trump likes tariffs so much,” said Jen Psaki on MS NOW, “you have to look at the Trump International real estate development” project moving forward in Vietnam.

Trump’s threat to slap the Vietnamese government with exorbitantly high tariffs on the self-titled “liberation day” came amid a push for luxury developments in and around the country. Hanoi was facing “intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs,” said The New York Times. That pressure prompted Vietnamese officials to request support from the top levels of government, as the project was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally,” per a letter obtained by the Times.

Trump’s “freewheeling use of tariffs as a tool of American power” has seen him apply the economic measure toward “national security goals, as well as the interests of individual companies,” The Washington Post said. Tariffs are a “tool the president enjoys because it’s personal power,” former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at HuffPo.

With tariffs, Trump doesn’t “have to go through Congress” and can “exercise personal power” instead. Tariffs, to Trump, are a “potent and unilateral mechanism for reintroducing systematic corruption into the economy,” said Mother Jones. Controlling tariffs allows the White House to “grant waivers and exemptions,” which forces “people, corporations, localities and even nations and foreign actors to come seeking reprieve on bended knee.”

Tchotchkes and royalties

The first year of Trump’s second term in office was a “lucrative” one when it came to “royalty payments for the various goods that are sold featuring his name and likeness,” said NBC News. Per his 2025 financial disclosure forms, Trump that year earned more than $1 million from sales of his “45 guitar, which features Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ phrase inlaid in ‘authentic pearl’ on the neck of the guitar, as well as the “number ‘45’ on the headstock, referring to his time as the 45th president of the United States,” said Fox Business.

The disclosure forms also list him as earning $2.5 million in royalties from “Trump Sneakers and Fragrances” and an additional $1.3 million from the “Greenwood Bible,” inspired by singer Lee Greenwood — a frequent Trump supporter — and his “God Bless the U.S.A.” anthem. “Besides a King James Version translation,” Trump’s bible contains “the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Greenwood song,” The Associated Press said.

Trump’s licensing and merchandise windfalls come after he “launched a number of new licensing deals” in late 2024, a “couple of weeks before taking the oath of office,” Time said.

Settlements and suit threats

Since returning to office, the famously litigious Trump has raked in at least $90 million in lawsuit settlements from tech and media juggernauts, including X, Meta and Paramount, The New York Times said, even as many of Trump’s suits weren’t “justified on the merits.” Several of those high-profile settlements were then used to “help fund the creation of Donald Trump’s presidential library,” The New Republic said.

The Miami-based site, which, in a “perfect Trumpian twist may also double as a hotel,” has earned congressional notice for its unique funding origins. “Not one” of the companies whose settlement funds are being applied “can say with any clarity where their multimillion-dollar donations to Donald Trump’s library slush fund are or where they will go,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said to The New Republic.

Scrutiny over Trump’s settlement-funded library comes as the White House is “engaged in discussions’ with the president’s IRS and Treasury Departments to “resolve” a $10 billion lawsuit filed this past winter that accuses the agencies of an “unauthorized leak of his tax information during his first administration,” CNN said. Trump filed that suit “personally, not in his official capacity as president” although any monetary settlement would see “Trump’s own administration paying him and his family.”

Like father, like sons

For as much as Trump has expanded the horizons of potential presidential profiteering, so too have his eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, done the same for the Trump dynasty. Last spring, the pair “contributed their family name — and nothing else of obvious value — to a complicated series of transactions” to take a significant stake in the cryptocurrency mining firm American Bitcoin, said The New Yorker. Had their father lost in 2024, “surely” they wouldn’t have been granted “such a large stake in a business that they had virtually no experience in and to which they had contributed so little.”

As the pair’s “new drone company seeks Pentagon contracts,” other government contracting companies in which at least one brother owns an ownership stake “are taking in tens of millions of dollars of new taxpayer money,” the AP said. Still, the notion that Donald Jr. should “cease living his life and making a living to provide for his five kids” simply because of his father is “quite frankly, a laughable and ridiculous standard,” a family spokesperson said to the outlet.

What happened

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump on Monday separately demanded that ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a parody White House Correspondents’ Association dinner roast during last week’s show in which Kimmel joked that the first lady had a “glow like an expectant widow.” The outcry followed the shooting incident at the real gala two nights later. Federal prosecutors on Monday charged the alleged gunman with trying to assassinate Trump.

Who said what

Kimmel’s “rhetoric” was “completely deranged,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?” It was “obviously” a “very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am,” Kimmel said on Monday night’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The joke “was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination, and they know that.”

What next?

The controversy over a joke about a “dinner meant to honor the First Amendment is sure to revive” the censorship battle between Trump and Kimmel that “erupted” last fall, The New York Times said. After a brief suspension following a joke involving Charlie Kirk, Kimmel signed a one-year contract extension due to keep him on air until May 2027.

What happened

Iran has proposed a deal to open the State of Hormuz provided the U.S. and Israel cease their attacks and the U.S. ends its naval blockade of Iranian ships and ports. Tehran’s nuclear program and enriched uranium would be discussed at a later date. The proposal, passed to the U.S. through Pakistan on Sunday, followed an Iranian offer to suspend its uranium enrichment that President Donald Trump rejected.

Who said what

Trump is “unhappy with Iran's proposal as he wants nuclear issues dealt with from the outset,” Reuters said, citing a U.S. official. The proposal was “subject to a vigorous debate inside the administration” over which side “has more leverage,” The New York Times said, “and which country is better positioned to endure the economic hardship” from the strait’s closure.

Iranian officials are “serious about getting themselves out of the mess that they’re in,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Fox News. The Americans “have achieved none of their goals, and this is why they are asking for negotiations,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters in Russia. “We are now considering it.” Leaders of European nations also weighed in: the U.S. “quite obviously went into this war without any strategy” and has “no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday. “A whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

What next?

The “tense stalemate” has “entered a Cold War-like phase of financial sanctions, gunboat interdictions and talks about having talks,” with “no immediate end in sight,” Axios said. With the midterms six months away, a “frozen conflict is the worst thing for Trump politically and economically,” said a source close to the president.

The Trump administration’s threat to review its position on Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands could have a significant impact on the future of the South Atlantic British Overseas Territory, analysts have said.

A leaked internal Pentagon memo published last week by Reuters revealed that, as punishment for not supporting Donald Trump’s war against Iran, the US could reassess diplomatic support for longstanding European “imperial possessions”, such as the ⁠Falkland Islands, which have been administered by Britain since 1833 but are still claimed by Argentina.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei is “upbeat about the prospects”, said Reuters, after the Trump ally told a radio show that “we are doing everything humanly possible to bring the Falkland Islands back into Argentine hands”.

On Monday, his vice president, Victoria Villarruel, ramped up rhetoric further by calling for Falkland Islanders to go back to England.

What did the commentators say?

Donald Trump “has repeatedly demonstrated his desire to use transactional diplomacy to pressure both allies and adversaries”, said the BBC. The Falklands are a “pressure point for the UK but irrelevant to the US”, making them a perfect target for this kind of “leverage”.

Given the current state of Britain’s armed forces, the UK would “struggle to defend the Falkland Islands if Donald Trump followed through on threats to withdraw American support for British sovereignty”, said The i Paper.

But while the loss of American backing for UK control of the islands would “make it easier for Argentina to press its claim more assertively”, said Dr Johanna Amaya-Panche, senior lecturer in international relations and politics at Liverpool John Moores University, an invasion remains unlikely.

“Argentina is not capable of retaking the islands militarily, and there is no credible indication that it intends to try,” but the Milei government “may adopt a more assertive diplomatic or legal strategy, seeking to internationalise the dispute and mobilise external support”.

Downing Street has insisted that the Falkland Islands’ status will remain unchanged, with the prime minister’s spokesperson saying “sovereignty rests with the UK and the islanders’ right to self-determination is paramount”.

“Such robustness is a welcome surprise,” said The Telegraph in an editorial. The government will be hoping the state visit by King Charles will help defuse tensions with the White House. The reality is that “casting doubt over the ownership of the Falklands would hardly be in Washington’s interests”. Even in 1982, the Royal Navy “had to leave other missions unresourced in order to retake the islands” and today its numbers are “so shrunken that it could never act meaningfully in the South Atlantic and in support of the US simultaneously”.

What next?

If the US did change its position to one in which it supported Argentinian claims over the islands, that would be “pretty significant”, Ed Arnold from the Royal United Services Institute security think tank, told the BBC, as “it might cause other countries to move that way as well”.

“You could potentially see a situation where Argentina pushes for some intervention at the UN and the US may support or just not actively block.”

“A change of US policy towards the sovereignty of the Falklands will not mean we will face a repeat” of the 1982 war with Argentina, said former defence secretary Penny Mordaunt in The Express. “But it should be a reminder that the world can change fast” and that “we owe it to all Brits, whether they reside in the UK or in her territories, that we are capable of defending them and their interests.”

Following an assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25, President Donald Trump wasted little time in framing the still-ambiguous episode to support his legally dubious ballroom construction efforts. He also used the opportunity to attack a familiar list of political adversaries, including Democrats and members of the press.

What did the commentators say?

After the attack on the WHCA dinner, Trump and his allies have “coalesced” around the embattled ballroom construction project as their “solution for presidential security,” The New York Times said. Trump’s plans for the White House ballroom include a secure bunker under what was once the East Wing. But Trump and his administration’s “coordinated effort” to connect the WHCA attempted shooting to the ongoing legal “tug of war” over the ballroom “ignored the realities of the annual dinner and the circumstances of the breach.” The shooting attempt has become “fodder to support building the president’s pet project,” said Zeteo. “Even before Trump addressed the public, the talking points already seemed to be circulating.”

Trump has a history of using attempts on his life as a “political symbol” to “rally his supporters and strengthen his grip on state affairs,” said South Korea’s The Chosun Daily. His post on Truth Social requesting the WHCA “LET THE SHOW GO ON” after the attack shows that even during a “crisis that could have led to a disaster,” Trump was able to display his “signature showmanship.”

It is “notable” that “neither Trump nor anyone on his team rushed to assign a political motive” in the hours immediately following Saturday’s attack, said The Sydney Morning Herald. Instead, Trump “predictably” spent the time turning the attack “to his own purposes.” The president’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of the shooting attempt, including at his press briefing that evening, “underscored his instinct to spin narratives with himself as the undaunted hero” while “rarely missing a chance to plug his priorities,” said Reuters.

There is a “pattern” at play, said Politico. After an attempt on Trump’s life, there are “calls from both sides to turn down the temperature. And then, a pivot.” After initially pushing for Americans to “resolve” their differences, it took “less than 24 hours” for Trump to insist in a 60 Minutes interview with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell that the “hate speech of the Democrats” is “very dangerous.”

As in previous instances where Trump has asked for bipartisan calm after facing violence, such calls “proved to be very short-lived,” said The Associated Press. A host of “right-wing politicians and media figures” have begun “laboring to blame the apparent assassination attempt on rhetoric from Democrats,” said Zeteo. It is this dynamic that has allowed Trump to cast himself as a unifier who, on Sunday, “vowed that violence should not win,” while at the same time “accusing the Washington press of being in league with Democrats and covering him unfairly,” said CNN.

What next?

That there were still WHCA after-parties and associated events in the hours following the assassination attempt is a “testament to the nonstop insanity of the Trump era,” during which an “active shooter getting close to the president — for a second time” can be so “quickly metabolized by Washington,” said New York magazine.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has already begun using the episode to “pressure a preservation group to drop a lawsuit seeking to halt the construction” of Trump’s ballroom, The Guardian said. “I hope yesterday’s narrow miss will help you finally realize the folly of a lawsuit that literally serves no purpose except to stop President Trump, no matter the cost,” Blanche said in a letter to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued to stop what it claims is Trump’s illegal ballroom construction. “Enough is enough.”

Ultimately, Trump has “experience” with the “opportunities presented by such moments,” Reuters said. “No one can turn danger into a political asset better than this president,” one White House official said to the outlet.

What happened

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Russia on Monday morning after a weekend of diplomatic trips to Pakistan and Oman, but no direct talks with the United States. President Donald Trump on Saturday called off an announced trip to Islamabad by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, saying it would be a waste of time given Iran’s lack of commitment to meet with them.

Who said what

“If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday. With U.S.-Iran talks “derailed, at least for now,” The New York Times said, “Tehran and Washington are sinking into an awkward limbo of neither peace, nor war,” with each projecting confidence they can “outlast the other in a standoff with drastic stakes for the global economy.” Pakistani officials said “indirect talks” were ongoing even as they “scrambled to reignite” direct negotiations, The Associated Press said.

What next?

Trump was “expected to hold a Situation Room meeting” on Monday after receiving an Iranian proposal to “reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war,” Axios said, “with nuclear negotiations postponed for a later stage.”

What happened

The gunman accused of trying to charge into the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night appears to have “set out to target folks who work in the administration, likely including the president,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said over the weekend. Law enforcement officials said they are trying to determine the assailant’s motive, but he was believed to have acted alone.

The suspect, identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of California, was tackled after sprinting through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton carrying a handgun, a shotgun and knives, police said. A Secret Service agent was shot but protected by a bulletproof vest.

Who said what

After popping sounds were heard outside the ballroom during the salad course, Secret Service agents swarmed in, ushering President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and top Cabinet officials to safety as most guests ducked for cover. The gunman “barely breached the perimeter,” Blanche told CNN, calling it a “massive security success story.”

At a White House press conference after the shooting, Trump “was unusually conciliatory,” The Associated Press said. But he “flashed a familiar anger” during a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, when Norah O’Donnell read from a manifesto Allen reportedly sent relatives before the attack, even though it did not mention Trump by name, Politico said. “I’m not a rapist,” and “I’m not a pedophile,” Trump said. “You shouldn’t be reading that on ‘60 Minutes,’ you’re a disgrace.”

What next?

Allen is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court Monday on preliminary charges of assaulting a federal officer and weapons charges.

As polarisation increasingly divides America, violence is becoming embedded in its politics.

“We do believe it was administration officials,” said Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche, when asked for the target of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington. “But as far as exacting threats that may have been communicated beforehand, we’re still actively investigating that evidence.”

For many Americans, Saturday night’s events were “at once shocking and familiar”, said Lisa Lerer in The New York Times. Politically motivated violence has become a “routine intruder” into our lives, bringing with it a “numbing narrative of assaults, bomb threats and assassination attempts”.

What did the commentators say?

“Instead of a speech stacked with heated barbs against the media, the event ended like many in the US do: with gun violence,” said Rachel Leingang in The Guardian.

The association’s initial decision to continue the event (it was later rescheduled) may have surprised some, but for many it “struck a chord about the regularity of gun violence in American life”. Trump said afterwards that the presidency is a “dangerous profession”, but the fact that violence in the political domain is a “feature”, rather than an “outlier, rang true on a night meant to celebrate the freedom of the press”.

Attacks like these are “convulsing” American politics from both sides of the partisan divide, said Guy Chazan in the Financial Times. The suspected gunman had barely been apprehended before “ranks of Maga influencers” were blaming Democrats, and left-leaning conspiracy theorists claimed it was a “staged” hoax to “advance Trump’s political agenda”.

So-called “conflict entrepreneurs” are “getting rich by making us angry at one another”, fuelled by a “loss of trust in democratic institutions that makes it easier to see illegal violence as a solution”, said William Braniff, from the American University. Modern assassination attempts are “backed by a growing public acceptance of the use of violence in the pursuit of political ends”, said Chazan. “Things could get even worse.”

Saturday’s events reveal how “dangerous” US politics has become over the last few years, said James Piazza, political science professor at Penn State, on The Conversation. Intense polarisation means opponents are “suspicious and hostile” towards each other, believing others to be “evil or immoral” instead of merely sharing a different view.

In turn, this has made violence more “normalised”, and because public backlash is “dampened” at each attempt, further violence becomes even “more likely”. Disinformation and social media have also accelerated this trend. Disinformed users are “hermetically sealed off” from alternative sources and this “facilitates radicalisation” for isolated communities.

Even with America’s “grim history of political violence”, Trump “certainly seems to attract a higher share than others of would-be assassins”, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. He has now been the target of three assassination attempts: his “ear was grazed” by a bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania; there was the Mar-a-Lago golf course incident that was foiled by Secret Service agents; and then Saturday’s Washington dinner.

Nearly following in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy, Trump said that he was “honoured” by comparisons with the four assassinated presidents because he’s “done a lot”. Let’s not forget that eight children were killed in Louisiana last week, but it “only briefly made the headlines”: mass shootings are now “part of the texture of American life”, said Luce.

What next?

It is “absolutely critical” that both Democratic and Republican politicians “unite to condemn this attack and all political violence”, said Piazza on The Conversation.

Commentators should condemn any violence with political aims and political elites should “adopt rhetoric that does not normalise this sort of behaviour. If the message comes from across the political spectrum, it will be that much more effective at reducing the public attitudes that nurture political violence.”

Following the Pennsylvania assassination attempt the image of Trump with a bloodied face raising his fist “partly defined his campaign”, said Luce. This time around, “any sympathy wave is likely to be more limited”.

Before the incident at the Washington Hilton Hotel, Trump’s approval ratings hit a “personal low of below 40%” in some polls last week, and the “rising unpopularity” of the war in Iran is “driving his nadir”.

Though there is no doubt Trump will “try to make political hay” from the attempt on his life, “ironically” it has been his “early zeal for assassinating senior Iranians” that is “shaping his political future”.

Congratulations to Kevin Warsh, President Trump's preferred pick to be the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, said Hakyung Kim in the FT. He managed to get through an eagerly awaited grilling about his nomination by the Senate Banking Committee “without causing a Treasuries market meltdown”.

Risk of escalation

Warsh carefully “sidestepped multiple gotchas on his independence from Trump” – including the suggestion that he is “a human sock puppet”. But ultimately the world's most important central bank still faces a political deadlock, said DealBook in The New York Times.

Thom Tillis, a Republican committee member, has vowed to block Warsh's appointment unless the Department of Justice drops its investigation into the current chair Jay Powell's building renovations. Powell has refused to quit next month as scheduled unless his successor is in place; Trump has threatened to fire him. For the moment, investors “are largely ignoring the drama”. But any escalation “carries huge risks”.

Even if this soap opera is swiftly resolved, Warsh faces “a high-wire act” convincing investors that he's his own man, “without angering Trump”, said Nick Timiraos in The Wall Street Journal. An erstwhile inflation “hawk”, he auditioned for the job by constructing a case for the rate cuts Trump wants – arguing that an AI boom “would soon deliver a productivity surge”. Yet the Iran war has changed everything.

Regime change

When Trump picked Warsh in January (in part because of his “central casting” looks), markets were factoring in at least one or two cuts this year, probably more, said The Economist. But the soaring oil price pushed headline inflation to 3.3% in March (up from 2.4% the month before) and next month's data could be equally painful. Few now expect cuts this year. Moreover, Warsh's AI argument has always been “shaky”. If the technology really does make US workers more productive, “the correct monetary response might well be to raise interest rates”.

Warsh's most interesting views, which also potentially bring him into conflict with politicians and the markets, concern the Fed's balance sheet, said John Authers on Bloomberg. “He is loudly on record that it should be smaller” – meaning that the Fed should sell down some of the huge portfolio of bonds it took on to deal with the 2008 financial crisis and then the pandemic. “At the margin, that would mean less liquidity in the market, and higher bond yields.”

Yet we're no clearer how he might actually go about this, said Hakyung Kim. Warsh is proposing “regime change”. But “if you're going to rip up the current playbook, you'd better have a better one, and it's not clear that Warsh does”.

President Donald Trump’s desire to outdo and undo the achievements of former President Barack Obama is well-documented. Trump in 2018 tore up the 2015 agreement by his predecessor to limit Iran’s ability to develop its own nuclear weapons. Now Trump faces a challenge of getting a better deal as he tries to wind down a costly war.

The president is “adamant” he can exceed Obama in Iran, said The Hill. The 2015 nuclear agreement was “one of the Worst Deals ever made,” Trump said on Truth Social. But foreign policy experts warn that getting a satisfactory deal with Iran will be “much easier said than done,” said The Hill. The “dizzyingly complicated” Obama agreement took two years to negotiate and involved experts “poring over the details of nuclear technology, sanctions and international banking.” The U.S. decision to abandon that agreement and go to war may have convinced Tehran that a “nuclear weapon would be the best deterrent they can pursue,” said Allison McManus at the Center for American Progress to the outlet.

The earlier agreement “capped Iran’s uranium enrichment for 15 years,” said CNN. Trump is now demanding a 20-year pause, while Iran wants limits for just five years. But Tehran is negotiating with new leverage: Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a “weapon that is far more usable than nuclear weapons,” said CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

What did the commentators say?

Trump has sold himself as the “ultimate dealmaker,” but that image is in conflict with his “intensifying love of unilateral power,” Bill Scher said at Washington Monthly. A good negotiator has “knowledge, patience, creativity and flexibility,” but the president prefers “impatiently breaking laws and norms.” Trump launched the war with Iran amid weeks of negotiations, which have left the regime’s leaders leery of reengaging. Obama, it now seems clear, mastered the “art of the deal” and avoided a disastrous war. “Trump didn’t, and here we are.”

One big difference between the 2015 agreement and any deal the U.S. makes now: Iran’s nuclear program is “largely in rubble,” Eli Lake said at The Free Press. Tehran may still possess as many as 500 uranium-enriching centrifuges, but the country’s ability to quickly develop a weapon “has been taken away through military force” and will be difficult to rebuild. Even if Trump fails to get a deal at this moment, he has nonetheless “destroyed the nuclear program that Obama legitimized.”

What next?

Trump faces “major hurdles” getting a better deal than Obama did, said The Guardian. And if a deal is reached, he will be asked to demonstrate that the war with Iran provided a superior outcome than what pre-war negotiations in Geneva were set to deliver. Otherwise the president will have “inflicted massive damage on the world economy” when other options were available. Getting to an agreement will be a challenge. There is a “trust deficit” between the two sides that “makes a solution so difficult.”

What happened

The Justice Department on Thursday reclassified marijuana as a less-dangerous Schedule III drug for medicinal and research uses, effective immediately. The order aligns federal policy more closely with the 48 states that allow some form of medical marijuana use.

Who said what

The reclassification “will make it easier to study medicinal applications of marijuana and could shore up support from influencers who support the research,” Axios said. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reclassify cannabis in December and appeared impatient last weekend when signing a separate order to loosen restrictions on psychedelics. “Joe, they’re slow-walking me on rescheduling,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan.

This is “one of the biggest changes to U.S. drug policy in decades,” Reuters said. But after “shares of cannabis companies jumped between 6% and 13% following the decision,” they “reversed their gains” as investors in the $47 billion industry digested the “limited scope of the federal government’s immediate moves.”

What next?

Marijuana for recreational use, as allowed in 24 states and Washington, D.C., remains an illegal Schedule I controlled substance, alongside heroin and LSD. But the Justice Department said it scheduled a June 29 hearing to consider a broader Schedule III reclassification for all cannabis.

The S&P 500, the benchmark US stock index, hit a record high on Wednesday. This is being mirrored in other major stock markets across Asia and Europe, despite growing concerns over global fuel and energy prices as a result of the war in Iran and the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.

“There’s a lot of risk out there and yet asset prices are at all-time highs,” Sarah Breeden, deputy governor of the Bank of England, told the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack. “We expect there will be an adjustment at some point”, she said. What “really keeps me awake at night is the likelihood of a number of risks crystallising at the same time”.

As Jack said: “It is unusual for a senior figure at the Bank to be so forthright on market movements.” With confidence fluctuating around peace talks, and reverberations in energy markets continuing, what has gone up could just as easily come down.

What did the commentators say?

“Nothing, it seems, can dent the almost inexplicable optimism coursing through financial markets,” said the ABC’s chief business correspondent Ian Verrender. In the past, stock markets would “shudder” and “tumble”, then spend a decade recovering from economic “calamity”; nowadays the recovery time is cut down to weeks, “if they bother to react at all”.

Investors are not “oblivious” to what is happening in the world, said Joe Rennison, financial markets reporter for The New York Times. They are just attuned to “what exactly the markets are measuring”, looking beyond the “immediate upheaval from the war” to concentrate on its “long-term effects on corporate profits”. Americans may be struggling to afford fuel for their cars, but companies have been “very profitable indeed” for “quite a while now”. Big tech is “riding a wave of enthusiasm”, and it is these bigger companies, like Microsoft and Meta, who have been shielded from the war and tend to influence the market more profoundly.

Although the market “rapidly rebounded – and then some” after Trump’s ceasefire announcement, having been on a steady slide for most of March, investors are “not simply taking Trump at his word” that the war is “almost over”. Instead, they are responding to the White House’s “apparent eagerness” to find an end to the combat. “Investors might not believe Trump, exactly, but they do seem to believe that the worst of the war has already passed.”

After “years of headline-driven volatility” and a “dip-buying mindset”, investors have learned not to “stay bearish for too long”, said Bloomberg. The current pattern echoes the “Ukraine-war playbook from early 2022, when an initial equities sell-off and commodity price surge” soon reversed to normal.

“It is never easy to price uncertainty,” said Tej Parikh in the Financial Times. Investors have long relied on “ebitda”, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, to ascertain the “core value of a business”. But it now appears they have changed their tune, relying on “earnings before Iran, tariffs and dubious announcements”.

What next?

Since the war in Iran began, analysts have “actually raised their expectations for upcoming profits” for S&P 500 companies, said The Associated Press. Major companies such as PepsiCo and GE Vernova have either “stuck by” or “raised” their revenue forecasts for the year, which were initially published before the start of the war. S&P 500 profits could “accelerate to 20% in the second quarter, and companies aren’t giving them many reasons to reconsider”.

Of course, the US stock market “can easily return to falling”. If US-Iran peace talks break down, or if oil supplies cause greater concern, Wall Street’s mood could “swing quickly back to fear”. If oil prices, in particular, stay elevated for long enough, that could “erode” profits and raise costs, not to mention “weaken the spending power” of consumers around the world.

The FBI and a congressional committee are investigating the mysterious cases of 10 missing or dead scientists and staff who worked at sensitive nuclear or space technology laboratories.

Social media has “lit up” with theories about the disappearances and deaths, said CBS News, as speculation has “swirled” about whether they are part of an effort to “harm” US nuclear or space programmes.

‘Sinister connection’

William Neil McCasland, a retired US air force general now director of technology at an aerospace defence firm, went missing from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 27 February.

Investigators soon became aware of other aerospace and nuclear officials and researchers who have gone missing or died in mysterious circumstances. These cases included a nuclear physicist and MIT professor who was fatally shot outside his Massachusetts home, an aerospace engineer who went missing during a hike in Los Angeles, and two scientists working on nuclear fusion and astrophysics who were murdered in their homes.

“The similar circumstances of some of the disappearances” and the subjects’ involvement in sensitive and secret research have “fuelled speculation about whether coordinated foul play or foreign espionage may be involved”, said The Hill.

The FBI confirmed it is “spearheading the effort to look for connections” between the 10 cases that have come to light and the Republican-led House Oversight Committee said it will examine “questions about a possible sinister connection”. In a post on X, Nasa said that it was cooperating with the investigations, but “at this time, nothing related to Nasa indicates a national security threat”.

The speculation has drawn in the US president. “I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half,” Donald Trump told reporters, confirming that an investigation was under way. It is “pretty serious stuff” but “hopefully a coincidence, or whatever you want to call it”.

‘People do just die’

People familiar with the cases said that what “underlies” these deaths and disappearances is “not a spy-thriller plot”, but “something more personal and tragic”, said CBS News.

McCasland’s wife said in a Facebook post that it “seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets”, pointing out that her husband retired from the air force more than 12 years ago.

Julia Hicks, the daughter of Michael David Hicks, a scientist who worked at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and died in 2023, told CNN there is “no train of logic” connecting her father’s death to that of other scientists. “I can’t help but laugh about it, but at the same time, it’s getting serious,” she said.

The cases are “scattered across several years at different and only loosely affiliated organisations”, said Joseph Rodgers, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If all of the scientists were working on one project or weapons system, then I’d be more suspicious,” he said.

A former US Department of Energy official was more succinct. “People do just die,” they said.

The Department of Justice is throwing hot charcoal on the meatpacking industry’s grill, as the agency has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation that could have wide-ranging implications for the beef market. The probe, which comes following repeated pressure from President Donald Trump, is happening as beef prices continue to rise, causing consumers to have a negative view of the economy.

What is the investigation about?

The DOJ is looking into whether “large meatpackers that supply American consumers engaged in criminal anticompetitive conduct,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the investigation. The probe is “looking at all of the major companies that sell beef in the U.S.” Four companies currently control 85% of the country’s beef market share: the U.S.-based Cargill and Tyson Foods, and the Brazilian-owned JBS and National Beef.

The crux of the investigation is whether these companies “reached illegal agreements over how they purchase cattle from ranchers,” said Bloomberg. The Justice Department reportedly believes beef companies could be doing this to cut costs, as “beef processors have been losing money for the last 20 months as they pay producers higher prices for cattle.” The investigation appeared to come at Trump’s behest. The president said in November 2025 he would “order the Justice Department to investigate the meatpacking industry for alleged collusion,” said Axios.

Other food companies, like McDonald’s, have also accused “big beef packers of collusion and price-gouging,” said The Guardian. As of now, the probe remains a noncriminal investigation. None of the companies or their employees “have been accused of any wrongdoing and probes don’t always lead to charges or lawsuits being filed,” said Bloomberg. JBS “isn’t aware of any criminal investigation” and “operates in a highly regulated industry and is committed to complying with all applicable regulations,” a spokesperson for the company told the Journal. Cargill, Tyson Foods and National Beef haven’t commented.

What is the bigger picture?

Questions about the beef industry aren’t new, as ranchers have “long complained about anticompetitive conduct by the four companies,” said Bloomberg. Evidence of consolidation within the beef industry is “reflected in sharply increased spreads between cattle prices and wholesale beef prices,” said a U.S. Department of Agriculture report from 2024, with “stronger evidence of market power in the meatpacking industry.”

But a criminal investigation perhaps beginning “raises the stakes considerably for the companies and their executives, who face the prospect of steep fines and prison time,” said Bloomberg. A prior investigation “into alleged price-fixing during the Covid-19 pandemic closed without action.” The current high beef prices are “driven mostly by structural factors,” Dennis Follmer, the chief investment officer at Montis Financial, told Axios. Consumers “shouldn’t expect near-term relief.”

The prospect of Trump becoming directly involved due to rising prices remains on the table, as the president’s approval rating on the cost of living has been consistently falling throughout 2026. When Trump called for the DOJ to investigate meatpackers in November 2025, the average price of ground beef was $6.54 per pound, up 91 cents year-to-year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It has continued rising since then and is currently $6.70 per pound.

Prosecutors in El Salvador have opened a mass trial of 486 alleged members of the infamous MS-13 gang on charges ranging from homicide and femicide to extortion and arms trafficking.

They have been accused of more than 47,000 crimes between 2012 and 2022, including an estimated 29,000 homicides. These trials encapsulate President Nayib Bukele’s “iron-fist approach” to fighting organised crime, said The Associated Press, in a country that has been in a state of emergency for four years.

But mass trials have been criticised by human rights organisations, including a group of UN experts who claim they “undermine the exercise of the right to defence and the presumption of innocence of detainees”. Many are held in custody for years before their trial, facing blanket rulings from unknown judges.

What is MS-13?

The MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha, thought to be a combination of “Mara” (“gang”), “Salva” (a shortening of Salvador) and “trucha” (“which translates roughly into street smarts”), said the BBC. “The 13 represents the position of M in the alphabet.”

The gang was formed “on the street corners of Los Angeles” in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants who had fled civil war, said Sky News. It only spread to Central America when the members were deported from the US.

Donald Trump designated the group a terrorist organisation last year and made “deportation agreements” with El Salvador to “exchange prisoners affiliated with the gang and others”.

The main aim of the mass trial is to target the “ranfla” – the “highest echelon” – of the gang, said The Times. Alongside its rival gang, Barrio 18, MS-13 at one stage controlled up to 80% of El Salvadoran territory through “extortion, drug dealing, contract killings and arms trafficking”. Prosecutors allege that the gang’s attempts to gain complete control amounted to a “parallel state, undermining national sovereignty”.

“Over three decades” Bukele’s government estimates the gangs have killed around 200,000 people, including many listed as disappeared.

Has a trial like this happened before?

The first “collective” trial of this magnitude took place in March 2025, said AP. At its conclusion, 52 members of Barrio 18 were convicted, with one individual sentenced to 245 years in prison.

In November, a similar trial found 45 members of a rival faction, Barrio 18 Sureños, guilty of several crimes and “handed down a 397-year prison sentence to one leader”.

What is the criticism?

Bukele’s “crackdown has drawn sharp criticism from human rights organisations”, said The Times. There is significant risk that, given the limited evidence specific to individuals, mass trials risk convicting innocent people.

Human Rights Watch estimated that El Salvador’s prison population has reached 118,000, “more than double the country’s capacity”. Set against “significantly worsening already poor prison conditions”, nearly 2% of the country’s entire population was incarcerated, “among the highest rates in the world”.

More than 500 people have already died in state custody under Bukele, and there have been reports of torture, said Agence France-Presse. Bukele has also acknowledged that “at least 8,000 innocent people” have been arrested under the crackdown, and have since been released, said AP.

Who is behind this?

President Bukele’s stance on criminal gangs has “made him the most popular elected head of state in the world”, said The Times. According to official figures released by his government, the rate of homicides fell from 7.8 per 100,000 people in 2022 to 1.3 last year, said Reuters.

Trump is a close ally. He said he had “the best relationship” with Bukele after the El Salvador president’s visit to the White House in 2025, said The Telegraph, despite previously accusing Bukele of sending MS-13 gang members to the US. Trump also signed a deal with Bukele last year, paying El Salvador between $6 million (£4.5 million) and $15 million (£11.3 million) to hold deportees in its prisons – “seemingly with little due process”.

What will happen next?

At the beginning of the trial, the judge stated that armed groups had disturbed “the peace of the Salvadoran population and the security of the state” for decades, and would be tried “with the full force of the law”.

Of the defendants, 413 of them are being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center (“Cecot”) in Tecoluca, and will watch proceedings on a screen. Cecot, a maximum-security prison built by Bukele in 2023, has “become a symbol of his controversial security policies”, said AP. The other 73 remain at large and will be tried in absentia.

Prosecutors say they have “overwhelming evidence” and will seek the maximum permitted sentence, said The Times. The trial could last up to six months.

‘The Constitution doesn’t make an exception for misusing police powers’

George F. Will at The Washington Post

Policing is an “indispensable and demanding craft requiring skills acquired through repetitions of good judgment in bad situations,” says George F. Will. So “litigation arising from law enforcement excesses acknowledges the craft’s exacting standards,” and “sometimes reluctant courts should provide remedies that affirm those standards.” The “militarization of law enforcement has been dramatized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operating with too little training,” and courts may “eventually acknowledge the absence of a police-power exception.”

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‘Honoring America’s 250th through service’

Mike Lawler and Bonnie Watson Coleman at Newsweek

There is “no other nation on earth, past or present, that can pride itself on citizens dedicating as much personal time and resources to causes dear to them,” say Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.). Every American “has a definition of ‘service’ — and that is something worth celebrating.” In “choosing service, we progress beyond division to action, helping write the next chapter of American history as one grounded in unity.”

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‘The terrifying convergence of fetal personhood laws and abortion bans’

Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic

“Fetal personhood laws and abortion bans are often intertwined,” says Melissa Gira Grant. But the “direct harm caused by the abortion bans has typically overshadowed the more abstract and punitive laws defining fetal personhood.” These laws “may not mention abortion at all. But fetal personhood laws are layered onto existing laws and emerging legal trends.” These are “not just legal or rhetorical strategies; they also shape how patients make health care decisions.” People’s “fears are not unfounded.”

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‘Trump showers health care crooks with love’

Whitney Curry Wimbish at The American Prospect

Donald Trump has “hit on a new role as a crusader against fraud,” but a new report “shows that Trump appears to support medical fraud, as long as corporate executives and other elites are the ones committing it,” says Whitney Curry Wimbish. Republicans “stump for Trump’s pet project to punish blue states under the guise of protecting taxpayers from medical fraud” but “those talking points are a smokescreen for Trump’s real aim: justifying his destruction of the American health care system.”

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New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran for office promising to raise taxes on the rich to pay for new social welfare programs. Now he is backing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal to levy a new tax on expensive second homes.

Manhattan “may have more billionaire residents per square foot” than just about anywhere in the world, said New York’s ABC 7. But many of the “luxury, multi-million dollar apartments” in the city are second homes. Hochul’s proposed “pied-à-terre” tax would apply to more than 13,000 such residences worth more than $5 million. Those locations are owned by the “super wealthy” to “store their wealth to benefit from New York City’s real estate market,” Mamdani said in a statement. Critics say the proposed tax will hurt the city’s construction and real estate industries.

The proposal comes as blue states are looking to raise taxes on wealthy residents. Golden State voters are contemplating a “one-time, 5% ‘wealth’ tax on roughly 200 California billionaires,” said USA Today. And the Maine Legislature this month passed a “millionaire tax” on the Pine Tree State’s wealthiest residents, said Maine Morning Star. Getting the highest earners to “pay just a small percentage more” will help solve the state’s revenue problems, Democratic State Rep. Drew Gattine told the publication. But there is a backlash.

What did the commentators say?

New York’s business community believed that the moderate Hochul “would surely stand in the way” of Mamdani’s tax-the-rich ideas, Crain’s New York Business said in an editorial. And Hochul is “adamantly opposed to the broader tax hikes Mamdani continues to champion” to close the city’s budget gap. But her backing of the second-home tax “moved the needle significantly to the left.” A similar proposal in 2019 failed after getting “scorched-earth opposition” from New York’s real estate sector. Broader tax reform would be more beneficial, but it is easier to sell voters on taxing “foreign oligarchs who spend two weeks of the year in a luxury Billionaires Row penthouse.”

If the concern is that taxing the rich will drive out wealthy New Yorkers, the second-home tax “threads that needle by targeting people who are, by definition, not full-time New Yorkers,” The New York Daily News said in an editorial. The people who buy second homes in the city do so because it is a “global hub of business and culture” and can “happily” pay the tax. They already “enjoy and benefit from the enormous services and amenities that the city offers,” so they can “pay a little bit more on their assets” to contribute to that vitality.

What next?

One notable second-home owner is loudly criticizing the proposed tax, said The Hill. “Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York!,” President Donald Trump, a Florida resident who owns a residence at New York City’s Trump Tower, said on Truth Social. Mamdani and Trump had previously found “common ground on the issue of affordability.” That ground may be lost. “The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG,” Trump said.

What happened

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving the Trump administration “to take a position in the private sector,” the White House announced Monday. She had been under scrutiny for months over a series of workplace misconduct allegations. Unlike the recent ousters of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer’s exit “was announced by a White House aide,” not President Donald Trump, The Associated Press said.

Who said what

The Labor Department inspector general opened an investigation in January into allegations that Chavez-DeRemer was having an affair with a security staffer, often “drank on the job” and “concocted official events to facilitate her personal travel plans,” Politico said. The White House and Labor Department initially called the claims baseless, but the “official denials got less full-throated as more allegations emerged,” the AP said.

Among the “embarrassing details” likely to emerge in a pending inspector general’s report, The New York Times said, were text messages sent to “younger female staffers” with “inappropriate requests” from Chavez-DeRemer, her husband and her father. “The text messages were the final straw,” a Republican close to the White House told Politico. “I think the secretary demonstrated a lot of wisdom in resigning,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters.

What next?

Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling will take over as acting secretary. Sonderling, a “longtime ally of business leaders,” had “already been directing policy and personnel-related decision-making in Washington” as Chavez-Remer spent much of her tenure “on the road,” The Washington Post said.

Every day and every week, it becomes more alarmingly evident that in the White House “a mad king reigns, virtually unchecked,” said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. Since he launched the frustrating war in Iran, President Trump has “reversed and contradicted himself repeatedly” about its goals while descending into enraged, profanity-flecked threats of genocide. On Easter Sunday, with Iran defying his demands to open the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, our commander in chief posted on Truth Social: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He threatened to completely destroy Iran’s power plants, bridges, and infrastructure—leaving 93 million Iranians without electricity, running water, or functioning hospitals—and followed two days later with this genocidal vow: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” In everything the nearly 80-year-old Trump does, he shows the world “he is mentally unstable, unfit for the office.” When Pope Leo XIV criticized the war in Iran and Trump’s brutal immigration roundups, Trump posted that the pontiff was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” before following up with an AI-generated image of himself as a robed Jesus Christ healing a sick man—later claiming it depicted him “as a doctor.” That was too much even for onetime acolytes, said Makena Kelly and David Gilbert in Wired. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcasters Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, among others, denounced Trump’s depiction of himself as the Messiah, and called for him to be removed from office, with Greene suggesting that Trump may actually be the Antichrist. Greene told former MAGA allies: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”

It’s no longer just Democrats and late-night comics questioning Trump’s sanity, said Peter Baker in The New York Times. Retired generals, former Republican officials, and foreign leaders are expressing deep concern about the “state of mind” of “the oldest president ever inaugurated.” In his second term, Trump “seems even less restrained and more incoherent,” publicly using profanity, wandering off at official meetings “into odd tangents” about poisonous snakes, Sharpie pens, and his White House ballroom, and repeatedly calling Greenland “Iceland” while insisting it should belong to him. He appalled allies when he gloated that liberal Hollywood director Rob Reiner had been allegedly stabbed to death by his son, and when, after the death of former FBI director and special counsel Robert Mueller, he said, “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.” After Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran, Democrats have called on the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump for mental unfitness, but he has surrounded himself with fawning loyalists, “rendering that idea moot.” Trump’s “chest-thumping and semi-coherent bluster” are nothing new, said Becket Adams in National Review, but now that he’s started a war of choice in the Middle East, he’s provided “the added bonus of a ticking body count”—including more than 3,600 Iranians and at least 13 Americans. It’s “fully reasonable” to question why our president keeps “teetering frantically between talk of peace and threats, promising terrible outcomes that no American has had time to consider, let alone endorse.”

Trump haters may “clutch at their pearls,” said Hugo Gurdon in the Washington Examiner, but he has a long, successful track record of issuing “bellicose threats” and making “outlandish” demands to get the other side to the negotiating table. Hasn’t anyone learned “he should be taken seriously, not literally?” Sorry, said Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, but it smacks of “desperation” to claim Trump is cleverly using Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” to intimidate Iran into concessions. Trump’s wild, irresponsible threats “achieved next to nothing.” Iran did not reopen the strait or surrender to his other demands.

All this “is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world,” said Sohrab Ahmari in Unherd. Trump owes his presidency to voters who grew tired of technocrats such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama overriding the public will to make trade, economic, and immigration policy, “often to the benefit of themselves and other elites.” But Trump “went into mad-king mode,” and the results make liberal technocrats “look better by comparison.” This is life “under a personalist regime,” said Lisa Needham in Public Notice, where all power is held by a cultlike leader “not accountable to the military or to a political party.” Trump “reverses decisions based on nothing but whims.” He demands that aides and followers show loyalty by “agreeing to believe the same lies he does.” When “Congress and the Supreme Court simply step aside and abdicate their power, then it’s all Trump, all the time.” Personalist government has brought us nonstop chaos, corruption, bitter division, and foreign conflict, and “it’s wrecking us.”

For weeks, the Trump administration has waged a brutal war on Iran. But now that Iran has successfully shifted the conflict’s nexus to the oil-shipping bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz, the White House has a new plan to inflict maximum pressure: economic warfare, the “financial equivalent” of a bombing campaign, said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a White House briefing last week.

What did the commentators say?

Blocking Iranian ports and shipping lanes and pivoting from “kinetic to economic warfare” is an attempt to “end the conflict without a new U.S.-Israeli onslaught,” said CNN. Per the White House’s “rationale,” the “ruinous financial and humanitarian consequences” of being unable to ship and sell oil leave Tehran with “no choice but to accept U.S. terms” to end the conflict.

Although focused on Iran specifically, the administration’s threats stretch beyond the Islamic Republic to those who would do business with it. Countries that are “buying Iranian oil” or hold Iranian funds in their banks now risk “secondary sanctions, which is a very stern measure,” Bessent said on PBS News. Iranians themselves will feel the “financial equivalent of what we saw in the kinetic activities.”

Bessent’s threat came one day after his Treasury Department notified “financial institutions in China, Hong Kong, the UAE and Oman” that they are at risk of secondary sanctions for “allowing Iranian illicit activities to flow through their financial institutions,” said The Associated Press. The “argument being made to Trump” is that no matter if the Iranians think they can “weather the storm,” any inability to pay their “loyalists” could “pressure Iran to the table.”

Approximately one-third of the oil Iran exports through the Strait of Hormuz “directly funds the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” said The Foundation for Defense of Democracies Senior Fellow Miad Maleki on Fox News. Bessent’s threats will “shut down a lifeline that the regime desperately needs right now to keep its economy on some life support.”

Trump himself has been a “heavy user of financial sanctions” targeting “countries, individuals and companies,” The Washington Post said. At the same time, his administration seems to have been “caught unawares” when rivals like China and Iran “weaponized their economic advantages.”

While sanctions have long been the “instrument of choice for applying pressure on Iran,” the White House’s pivot toward “more kinetic forms of economic coercion” blurs the line between “financial restriction and military intervention,” said Harsh Pant, an international relations professor with King’s India Institute at King’s College London, at The Economic Times. “By physically interdicting maritime traffic” with its naval blockade, Trump is showing a willingness to enforce America’s “economic objectives through direct control of global commons.”

What next?

In many ways, the “damage” caused by economic weapons is already “sparking a response,” with nations that depend on the Strait of Hormuz “making plans to reduce their vulnerability to a future closure,” the Post said. But critics warn that attempts to impose other financial consequences on Iran could ultimately backfire on the United States and its allies. Much of the previous phase of war has “helped Iran’s economy,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), per the AP. Imposing further economic conditions is simply an attempt by Bessent to “mop up the mess that Donald Trump has created by initiating this war.”

The administration could still be making a “sound bet,” said CNN. Iran’s economy has been “shattered by sanctions” and could “quickly suffer critical food shortages, hyperinflation and a banking crisis” that would push Tehran to settle with the Trump administration. But this hope shared by “U.S. officials, conservative editorial pages and analysts” may ultimately “rest on an assumption” that has “led the U.S. astray in the Middle East” many times in the past.

‘AI and robotics will aid, not end, human space exploration’

Mark R. Whittington at The Hill

Some people “contend that advances in AI, robotics and electronics will allow Earth to explore and even commercially exploit other worlds such as the moon and Mars with just machines,” says Mark R. Whittington. But “humans will not be replaced either on Earth or in space” and robotics “will actually enhance human capacity.” While robots can “take over tasks that involve pattern optimization,” humans “will still retain tasks that require creativity, emotional intelligence and determining why actions need to be undertaken.”

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‘Trump’s presidency is what evil looks like: absurd, frightening, cruel’

Nesrine Malik at The Guardian

Trump “defies attempts to make his actions cohere,” says Nesrine Malik. His “lack of vision or ideology are misread as attributes that make him somehow less dangerous than the authoritarians of the past who have become the template for what evil looks like.” But Trump’s “constant self-aggrandizement, his grudges against political adversaries, the fury at being challenged by the press, the revenge he promises to wreak” are “ways to erase and avoid what is a permanent terror of humiliation.”

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‘How American schools can address political polarization’

Deborah Kenny at Time

Polarization “has become one of the defining threats to American democracy,” says Deborah Kenny. To “address these issues, some schools have turned to civics content, media literacy and dialogue initiatives.” But these efforts “misunderstand the problem. Polarization is more than a knowledge deficit. It is a self-government deficit.” Students “should be exposed to competing views and learn to articulate multiple sides of an issue,” and schools “must defend free inquiry, reject dogma and privilege the unencumbered search for truth.”

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‘Why are workers stuck? Not enough employers.’

Kathryn Anne Edwards at Bloomberg

What “makes recessions so harmful to workers is the freezing of movement,” says Kathryn Anne Edwards. The “gears of the labor market — gears that are constantly shuffling workers from job to job to unemployment to job again — slow to a crawl.” This is “what is making today’s labor market so damaging.” The “market has been heading toward a situation like this — with recession-like conditions of slow gears even when the market should be tight — for a while.”

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It has been a busy spring for JD Vance. The diplomatically untested vice president was tapped for wartime negotiations with Iran, became the administration’s mouthpiece in a doctrinal feud with Pope Leo and led the White House in a last-ditch effort to salvage now-ousted Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. It has hardly been an auspicious season for someone positioning themselves to carry the MAGA torch post-Trump.

Can he come back from a string of public flops?

Despite entering office as a “man full of ideas” just over a year ago, Vance and his opinions “matter less and less” within the Trump administration, said Idrees Kahloon at The Atlantic. While his diminished clout may be the “typical fate” of the vice president who is “forever on display but seldom listened to,” Vance’s shrinking footprint is a “major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill,” that of “Trumpism after Trump.”

Admittedly, the job of being veep was not “designed to be fun,” Edward Luce at the Financial Times said. But being Trump’s number two “brings unique discomfort.” Vance is “flailing” at backing policies that “often turn 180 degrees overnight,” rendering him “no longer Trump’s obvious successor.” Even if he should “regain his place in the Trumpian firmament,” there is “no such thing as a Vance base” within the modern GOP.

The past few weeks saw Vance bring his “noncharisma to bear” on Orbán’s behalf, prompting voters to “commit themselves to a serious program of Orbán Renewal” before he jetted off to “screw up the Iran peace talks,” Charles Pierce said at Esquire. Vance is playing “both sides against the middle” on Trump’s war in Tehran so as to maintain his “alleged viability in 2028,” while wings of the “elite political media” ready themselves to position him as the “next tinhorn Reasonable Republican.”

The future remains unwritten, but it’s “hard to imagine things going worse” for the veep, largely because Trump “forced Vance into this position,” Asawin Suebsaeng said at Zeteo. Vance may believe in Orbán’s ultra-nationalism as an “ideological pursuit, not a practical one” but it’s hard to “identify any political advantages” to his recent “crusade” on Orbán’s behalf, said Noah Rothman at the National Review. “Conversely, the downsides are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.”

Every time Vance debases himself on Trump’s behalf, “he gets less and less in return,” said Dana Milbank at The New York Times. Not only have his “political fortunes” begun to “dim,” his “soul has become a depreciating asset.” In many ways, Vance has “cast himself as the chief ideologist” of a MAGA movement with “no ideology” beyond the “instincts, impulses and glory of one man,” The Economist said.

Vance’s attempts to “take on” Pope Leo by attacking his “area of expertise” highlight the “deadly sin of pride,” Tom Nichols said at The Atlantic. Describing the “willingness” of someone like Vance to challenge the Vatican “requires a word from Yiddish rather than Latin: chutzpah.” That he would encourage Leo to “stay in his lane” while at the same time spreading “his version of the gospel from his powerful political perch” could prove “one contradiction too many, even for this skilled political chameleon,” Nia-Malika Henderson said at Bloomberg.

The well-positioned ‘heir apparent’

Still, Vance may remain well-positioned ahead of 2028. His “unusual second job” serving as the Republican National Committee’s finance chair is “exactly” what an “ambitious presidential aspirant might dream up,” said Theodore Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher at The New York Times said. While he’s done “some good for the party,” Vance has also done “some good for himself” by “wooing” the GOP’s “richest and most influential patrons,” even as his camp is “leery of being seen as plotting about anything beyond the 2026 midterms.”

In March, Vance was the main attraction at the closed-door spring summit of the Rockbridge Network, a “secretive donor group” that he cofounded in 2019 during his “stint as a private investor,” said Gabe Kaminsky at CBS News. Although his remarks were focused on 2026, the larger question “looming” over the confab was whether he had 2028 plans in place. Given Rockbridge’s reach within the MAGA coalition, Vance seems “poised to stand at the crossroads” of varying GOP interests that, one attendee told the outlet, “want JD to be the heir apparent.”

President Donald Trump has nothing if not an active imagination. Since taking office, he has pitched multiple ostensibly revolutionary products and plans to the nation. Some are material planks of his America First agenda, while others are seemingly speculative flights of questionable feasibility. Whether touting settlements on Mars or “freedom cities” at home, Trump has never been at a loss for ideas about the next big thing.

Aliens

In February 2026, Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he had directed his administration to identify and release government files containing “any and all other information” about the “highly complex but extremely interesting and important” matter of aliens, UFOs and other extraterrestrial phenomena. Trump should “peel back the layers of that onion, let America decide if we can handle it,” Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett said in a Fox News interview two months later. “I think we can handle it.”

Even with Trump’s “presidential intent,” federal bureaucracy and legal safeguards will determine “whether the files are ever fully revealed,” said CNN. Those hoping for immediate bombshells may want to “temper expectations a bit,” said Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, to the outlet. UFO hunters should expect, at minimum, a “fairly long, and probably a bit of a slow process.”

Golden Dome

As one of the first executive orders of his second term, Trump in January 2025 directed the implementation of a “next-generation missile defense shield for the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and other next-generation aerial attacks,” said The White House. Dubbed the “Iron Dome for America” at the time, there has been “little progress” made on the since-renamed Golden Dome system, with “internal misalignment on the administration’s plans for the architecture causing delays,” National Defense said.

At the “heart” of the networked satellite defense system would be “space-based interceptors” designed to “find and destroy enemy missiles and drones in the early stages,” said Gizmodo. That technology, however, “does not exist yet and is deemed theoretically ineffective and impractical.” Nevertheless, Golden Dome will demonstrate “operational capability by the summer” of 2028, said project director Gen. Michael Guetlein to lawmakers earlier this month, per The Washington Examiner. He also admitted that pace-based interceptors may not be part of the “final architecture as originally envisioned” if the tech is shown to be “prohibitively costly,” said Breaking Defense.

Boots on Mars

While speaking remotely with NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson in 2017, the president said he would like to see a manned mission to Mars “during my first term or at worst during my second term.” The United States will “lead the world in space and reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said in the closing days of his 2024 reelection campaign, reiterating the promise of historic planetary exploration alongside major donor, SpaceX CEO and future-DOGE chief Elon Musk. Under his leadership, Trump said at his second inaugural address in 2025, America will “pursue our Manifest Destiny” by sending astronauts to “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” a message he returned to in his address to Congress that year.

In a memo to NASA in late 2025, Trump “confirmed that he wants to send astronauts back to the moon” instead, thereby “putting eventual Mars missions on the back burner,” Le Monde said. A manned Mars mission would “likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars spread over a number of years,” said Nature. NASA, however, spends “$25 billion a year on all of its programs,” and faces further potential budget cuts from the administration.

Freedom Cities

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Trump campaigned on establishing “Freedom Cities,” tracts of federal land where businesses could “focus on technological innovation” and potential homeowners would revel in futuristic patriotism, said Politifact. At the time, Trump’s campaign advisers framed the proposal as comparable to “Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the transcontinental railroad, Teddy Roosevelt’s vision for a national park service and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System,” said Politico. By March 2025, multiple interest groups had begun “drafting Congressional legislation” to advance the development of Freedom Cities “where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval” from the associated federal agencies, Wired said.

Concurrently, Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland have been met with interest from “some Silicon Valley tech investors” envisioning their own “libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation” on an American-controlled Island, Reuters said. The notion has been “taken seriously” by U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Ken Howery, although Greenland remains, for now, in Denmark’s control. Despite his utopian campaign promises, Trump “hasn’t lent any rhetorical weight to the idea recently,” Politifact said in February. It is possible that “preliminary work undertaken by outside groups will eventually be reflected in tangible developments.”

Medbed

In September 2025, the president shared a since-deleted video to Truth Social promoting “access to new medical technology” in the form of a “cure-all bed” with roots in “conspiratorial corners of the internet,” said CNN. “Every American” will have “their own medbed card” granting access to medbed hospitals, an AI-generated Trump said in footage “intended to resemble a Fox News segment” hosted by daughter-in-law Lara Trump. Why was the footage AI? Because “no one has an actual photo” of a medbed, said McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. “Let’s be clear, they don’t exist.”

Trump is “transparent,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt when asked about why the president shared a doctored video of a nonexistent technology on Fox News. “He likes to share memes and videos,” she said, calling it “refreshing” that Trump is “so open and honest.”

What happened

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered lawyer John Eastman, a key architect of President Donald Trump’s failed effort to overturn his 2020 election loss, to be stripped of his law license and “stricken from the roll of attorneys.” The ruling upheld a 2024 State Bar Court decision to disbar Eastman for concocting strategies to submit fake Trump electors and push Vice President Mike Pence to block Joe Biden’s victory in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

Who said what

Eastman “remains one of the highest-profile figures in Trump’s orbit to face enduring consequences” for participating in his 2020 election schemes, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack, Politico said. Although he only lost his license to practice law in California, disbarment decisions are “typically adopted by authorities in other jurisdictions.” State bars “across the country have been trying to seek accountability” against Eastman and other lawyers involved in trying to subvert the election, The New York Times said. Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C., in 2024, and Jeffrey Clark’s D.C. 2025 disbarment is tied up in appeals.

What next?

Eastman’s legal team said they would appeal his disbarment to the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.

What happened

The Senate on Wednesday rejected a fourth attempt by Democrats to limit President Donald Trump’s authority to wage war on Iran, in a mostly party-line 52-47 vote. The “repeated defeats underscore the durability of Republican backing” for Trump, The New York Times said. But “some GOP lawmakers suggested that their patience was wearing thin as the conflict drags on, its economic fallout reverberates among their constituents and the president’s bellicose statements intensify.”

Who said what

Republicans “say they will keep faith in Trump’s wartime leadership, for now,” The Associated Press said. But they “are anxious for the conflict to end, and some are eyeing future votes,” notably a statutory deadline at the end of the month. Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, if Congress doesn’t declare war or authorize the use of force within 60 days, or grant a 30-day extension, U.S. forces must be withdrawn.

Trump originally predicted the Iran war would be over within four or five weeks, but with the 60-day deadline “rapidly approaching,” he’s sending “mixed signals,” The Washington Post said. Trump keeps insisting the war is almost over, but he just “imposed a naval blockade on Iran and sent thousands more troops to the Middle East.”

What next?

The House is expected to vote Wednesday “on its own resolution to block Trump from ordering more strikes on Iran,” the Post said. The outcome of the vote “is uncertain,” said the AP.

What happened

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office on Tuesday asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to erase the seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders found guilty of playing key roles in the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack to keep President Donald Trump in power. The Trump administration has “determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Pirro’s office said. Trump pardoned most of the Jan. 6 rioters but commuted the lengthy prison sentences of the 12 covered by the new filing.

Who said what

The motion to expunge the convictions of ringleaders including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is the “latest effort by the Trump administration to erase the stain of Jan. 6,” Politico said. Asking the appeals court to “toss out the guilty verdicts” also lets the Justice Department avoid the “awkward situation of having to defend the convictions,” The New York Times said. That would “likely have required administration officials to assert that the far-right groups were acting on behalf” of Trump.

What next?

The request to vacate the last remaining Jan. 6 convictions is “likely to be granted because prosecutors have broad discretion to pursue or drop criminal charges,” The Washington Post said.

What happened

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Tuesday unveiled a bill to set up a bipartisan panel that could help remove a mentally or physically incapacitated president under the 25th Amendment. The legislation, which had 50 Democratic cosponsors, is a “matter of national security,” Raskin said in a statement. “Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows” as he “threatens to destroy entire civilizations” and “aggressively insults the pope,” among other erratic behavior.

Who said what

The 25th Amendment empowers the vice president, plus the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress” provides, to declare the president unfit for office. “This body should have been set up” when the amendment was ratified in 1967, Raskin said. A White House spokesperson called Raskin a “lightweight” and praised Trump’s “sharpness” and “unmatched energy.”

The Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate would each pick four of the panel’s 16 members — physicians, psychiatrists and former top Cabinet officials — and the panel would pick a 17th member as chair. If a medical examination found the president unfit, a majority of the panel could vote to suspend the president with the assent of the vice president.

What next?

The legislation “is a long shot,” Axios said, as “Republicans control Congress, and Trump could simply veto it.”

Democrats are ready to be done with Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s critics are starting to talk more openly about removing him from office, using impeachment or the 25th Amendment. They assert that his recent social media tirades against Iran and Pope Leo reveal he is unfit for office.

Democrats in Congress mostly “steered clear of threatening impeachment” since Trump’s return to the White House, said The New York Times. The president’s threat last week to wipe out Iranian civilization “dramatically” shifted their calculations, spurring dozens of “formerly hesitant” House Democrats to back articles of impeachment. Trump “seems to be taking us on a path to mass war crimes,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on X. The president’s recent “erratic behavior and extreme comments” have “turbocharged” discussion of his mental fitness, said the Times. The challenge: Removal efforts are “doomed to fail so long as Republicans control Congress,” said The Associated Press.

What did the commentators say?

The “fate of the Earth depends” on Trump’s removal from office, Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The president’s growing list of “embarrassingly profane and unspeakably evil” social media posts demonstrates that he is “mentally and physically deteriorating,” a danger given his command of the “planet’s largest air force and a large cache of nuclear weapons.” The threat is too urgent to wait for Democrats to win control of Congress in November. Americans should join a May 1 general strike called for by the organizers of the “No Kings” protests to make their feelings clear. “It is a time for action.”

Democrats’ talk of impeachment “plays into Iran’s hand,” Peter Lucas said at The Boston Herald. Despite his words, Trump “will not end civilization in Iran.” But he will end Iran’s attempt to develop its own nuclear weapon. Democrats are looking for an excuse to “impeach him anyway if they gain control of the House in November.” They should instead acknowledge that Trump “saved the day” by taking action against Iran.

The 25th Amendment is “having a moment,” Ian Millhiser said at Vox, but it is unlikely to be used against this president. The constitutional provision would allow the White House cabinet to “temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president,” but the process is designed to replace an executive who is “physically or mentally incapacitated” rather than one who is “merely bad at being president.” Other democracies make it easier to remove an “incompetent, unfit or unpopular leader.” The United States should join their ranks.

What next?

Democratic leaders are trying to “shut down” impeachment talk, said Axios. That is not the “best use of our time” given that the effort would inevitably fall short, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said to the outlet. Dean and other senior Democrats want the party’s focus to be on “concrete issues like the war in Iran and affordability” as midterm elections approach, said Axios. An impeachment that fails to remove Trump, said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), “is worse than no impeachment at all.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Monday deleted from his social media account an apparently AI-generated image showing him dressed like Jesus and healing a man with orbs of light in his hands amid a panoply of religious and patriotic imagery. Following sharp condemnation, including from conservative Christian supporters, Trump told reporters he had posted the image but “thought it was me as a doctor,” and “only the fake news” would claim he was depicting himself as Jesus.

Who said what

The post’s removal was a “rare retreat” for Trump, who as a rule “does not apologize for doing and saying things that hurt or offend people,” The New York Times said. But the “image depicting himself as a Christ-like figure sparked outrage on the religious right,” angering a group that has “rallied behind Trump” through “two impeachments and three elections,” The Wall Street Journal said.

The image was “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” and Trump needed to “ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God,” Megan Basham, an evangelical Christian writer at The Daily Wire, said on X. Conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher told the Journal that Trump is “radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”

What next?

The “consternation over Trump’s social-media posts,” including his “pointed criticism of Pope Leo XIV,” could “turn into a political liability for Republicans,” the Journal said. Catholics “are America’s largest swing religious vote,” Axios said, “and Trump’s support among them was already sliding” before his posts.

Pam Bondi has discovered that “loyalty can get you a job with President Trump,” said Lindsey Granger in The Hill, “but it certainly won’t help you keep it.” The attorney general was fired earlier this month despite trying to do everything the president wanted. Over her 14-month tenure she purged scores of career prosecutors perceived as insufficiently MAGA, shuttered Justice Department offices that had probed Trump and his pals, and conducted lawfare against his political opponents. “But in the end, that just wasn’t enough.” Sources said the president was especially frustrated that Bondi hadn’t been more successful in prosecuting foes like former FBI boss James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Never mind that those cases “didn’t fail for lack of effort—they failed because they were weak.”

With Bondi ousted just weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, other top administration officials are now wondering if they’ll be next to hear “You’re fired,” said Matt Dixon and Peter Nicholas in NBCNews.com. Trump advisers say National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are all at risk of being booted.

Bondi’s real sin in Trump’s eyes was that “she couldn’t make ‘it’ go away,” said LZ Granderson in the Los Angeles Times. “And you know what I mean about ‘it.’” She fueled the public obsession with Jeffrey Epstein by telling Fox News in early 2025 that the sex trafficker’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now.” There was no client list, and the resulting furor led to a bipartisan law that forced the release of the DOJ’s Epstein files—which contain hundreds of references to the financier’s former friend, Donald Trump. Bondi was an incompetent lackey, said the New York Daily News in an editorial. But “her firing bodes ill for the state of our democracy” because whoever comes next could be even worse. Acting DOJ boss and former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche has already declared his hostility to the rule of law, saying that it’s the president’s “duty” to influence investigations against his political opponents.

Can anyone succeed at the Justice Department “given Trump’s expectations?” asked The Wall Street Journal. The president wants an AG who’ll twist the law to his whims, but judges and juries will still refuse to play along. Trump needs an attorney general who will give sound legal advice, and—as then-AG Bill Barr did in 2020 when Trump demanded the Justice Department unearth nonexistent evidence of election fraud—say no. But that’s a word the “boss doesn’t want to hear.”

What happened

President Trump recently claimed a “total and complete victory” after Iran agreed to a 14-day ceasefire with the U.S., a fragile deal that both sides presented in starkly different terms. The agreement was struck just hours after Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” and a day after he threatened the “complete demolition” of every bridge and power plant in the country unless it agreed to a deal and reopened the Strait of Hormuz—a Persian Gulf channel through which 20% of the world’s oil flowed before the start of the six-week war.

Trump’s threat to target civilian infrastructure, a likely war crime if carried out, drew condemnation from figures ranging from Pope Leo XIV to podcaster and former MAGA ally Tucker Carlson, who pleaded with White House aides to keep the president away from the nuclear football. But shortly before Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline, he announced a Pakistan-brokered deal for the ceasefire. Trump called the agreement a landmark that could pave the way for “the Golden Age” of the Middle East. Iran’s security council, meanwhile, hailed the agreement as an “undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat” for the U.S.

Questions remained about the shape of the deal. Trump called a 10-point Iranian plan “a workable basis” for upcoming peace talks in Islamabad. But he then said a version of the plan released by Iran—which called for the lifting of all sanctions and the payment of war damages by the U.S.—wasn’t the one he’d agreed to. Trump hailed the “complete” and “immediate” opening of the Strait of Hormuz, but Iranian officials said transiting ships would have to arrange passage with Iran’s military and pay tolls to Tehran. Trump also said the U.S. would work with Iran to “dig up and remove” its stockpile of 970 pounds of enriched uranium that was buried under joint U.S.-Israeli attacks last summer. But Tehran’s 10-point plan includes U.S. acceptance of Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

Amid the wrangling, Lebanon emerged as a flashpoint. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the ceasefire applied everywhere “including Lebanon,” but Israel, which is battling Iran-backed Hezbollah there, and the U.S. insisted otherwise. Israel hit Lebanon with scores of air strikes in a single day, killing at least 250 people, according to local officials. Trump said the issue will “get taken care of.”

What the columnists said

Trump’s retreat followed a “chaotic” blitz of negotiations, said Barak Ravid in Axios. After U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff flatly rejected Iran’s initial 10-point peace proposal, it set off a fevered round of amendments, passed by Pakistani mediators between Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with Egyptian and Turkish officials helping to “bridge gaps.” Once they landed on a ceasefire proposal, it was greenlit by Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, whom China was advising “to seek an off-ramp.” Next was Trump, who was urged to reject it by “hawkish allies and confidantes.” Even some close associates thought he’d spurn the offer “right up until he took it.”

Trump thankfully backed off his “genocidal threats” said Jennifer Rubin in The Contrarian. But that shouldn’t diminish their “horror.” A man who holds the nuclear codes threatened the vaporization of a nation of 93 million people in starkly religious terms, warning in one post that “Hell will reign down” and “Glory be to GOD!” It was “a mortifying intersection” of Christian nationalism, “pathological narcissism, and fascist warmongering.” This deeply sick man endangers not just our national security but the “stability of the planet.” Congress must remove him from office.

The president’s rhetoric was “condemnable,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. But to project “unflinching determination” amid a “contest of wills and hard power” has undeniable benefits. And it “forced the Iranians to blink,” said Eli Lake in The Free Press. They’ve agreed to ease their blockade of the Strait of Hormuz based on nothing but an agreement to negotiate. Meanwhile, having lost its navy, most of its missile launchers, and its top political and military leadership, the Islamists in Tehran have “never been poorer, weaker, or more isolated.”

This was a straight-up “surrender,” said William Kristol in The Bulwark—but by Trump, not Iran. Just a month ago he was demanding Iran’s “unconditional” capitulation. But the mullahs and Revolutionary Guard still control Iran. The regime still has its enriched uranium and “functional missile and drone capabilities.” And it now has unprecedented control over the waterway through which its Gulf Arab neighbors export oil and natural gas, and has shown the devastation it can inflict on those countries and the global economy in any future conflict.

Selling this as a win won’t be easy, said Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns in Politico, but that’s clearly Trump’s intention. Given the public opposition to the war, spiking gas prices, and “the rapidly worsening global economic outlook,” he’s anxious to move on. And because stock markets surged following his ceasefire announcement, it’s hard to imagine he’ll resume the bombing. So “brace yourselves” for a barrage of messaging that “America won.”

Let’s count the cost of this debacle, said Anthony L. Fisher in MS.now. Thirteen U.S. service members are dead along with at least 32 people in Gulf Arab nations, 20 Israelis, and more than 1,600 Iranians, while the rest “remain under the yoke of a sadistic theocracy.” With his warmongering, flip-flops, and unhinged threats, our unstable, amoral president has done “irreparable damage to America’s reputation” and “upended” the postwar global order. “I’m not feeling any safer. Are you?”

What next?

President Trump will send a team led by Vice President JD Vance to Pakistan to “negotiate an end” to the war, said Steven Nelson in the New York Post. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner will also join the weekend talks. Iran’s participation “is in flux,” because it has told mediators it won’t attend without a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Reopening the Strait of Hormuz is “only the first step” toward “getting more energy flowing through the Persian Gulf,” said Rebecca F. Elliott and Ivan Penn in The New York Times. Dozens of refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields across the region were hit during the conflict, shutting down “10% or more of the world’s oil supply.” Reversing that requires replacing equipment and “recalling employees and ships that have scattered across the globe.” With the ceasefire “on shaky ground,” the timeline is “highly uncertain,” but even under positive conditions, recovery will be “a months-long process.”

The Department of Justice has opened a probe into the National Football League, exploring whether the sports juggernaut engaged in anticompetitive practices through the various streaming packages it offers viewers. While the league’s increasingly complex subscription structures may represent a legally actionable transgression, the DOJ’s investigation does not exist in a bubble. It follows years of hostility between the president and the NFL.

‘Fragmented viewing experience’

The Justice Department is investigating whether the NFL’s “deals with streaming services are leading fans to pay too much to watch pro football on TV,” said NPR. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 permitted the league to let teams “negotiate for the media rights together,” but critics argue that more regulation may be necessary, as “this isn’t the same marketplace anymore.”

The rising costs of airing high-profile events are being “propelled in part” by demand from “deep-pocketed tech companies hoping to woo subscribers and advertisers,” said The Wall Street Journal. To meet that demand, the NFL has “increasingly sliced off smaller packages of games” for individual streaming services, resulting in a “more fragmented viewing experience” for consumers.

Within the NFL, there’s a sense that the Murdoch family, which owns Fox Corporation, is the “key driver behind the DOJ probe,” said ESPN. Murdoch’s media empire has “turned the cost of streaming into a hobby horse issue,” said league insiders to the outlet. This comes amid a “growing bipartisan anti-streaming sentiment in Washington” and during a Trump administration that has “at times targeted the league.”

‘Revenge tour’

Trump has a “long history” of “weighing in on the fortunes of football,” said The Independent. He condemned former quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem and demanded the Washington Commanders return to their racially insensitive original name. But Trump’s “grievance” with the league “stretches back further, to at least 1984,” when he unsuccessfully attempted to launch a new franchise for the sport.

Trump has “tried to get into the NFL a couple times since then” — defeats that now fuel the president’s “revenge tour for the league humiliating him and permanently barring him from the cool kids’ table,” said Above the Law. “If they screw me over, I’m gonna show them,” Trump allegedly said in 2014, broadcaster Stephen A. Smith told ESPN. “I’m gonna get them all back. I’m going to run for president of the United States.”

The NFL is “absolutely using its power to squeeze the media,” and the media, in turn, is “passing that on to the consumer,” said Above the Law. But this administration let Ticketmaster’s monopoly “walk” and put itself behind a “consumer-crushing media merger” on behalf of Paramount’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. In that context, Trump and his administration “don’t care about sports fans getting gouged.”

The difference between federal officials moving against the Sports Broadcasting Act now and Trump’s other tangles with the NFL is that there are Democrats “aligned" with the Department of Justice in this instance, said ESPN. Congress could repeal and pass new laws to further regulate NFL viewing options, but the lengthy legislative and legal process means fans “might not notice any significant difference to the way they watch games anytime soon.”

The divide between the American president and the American pontiff has exploded into view. Pope Leo has repeatedly rebuked President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and war in Iran, and Trump is now returning the criticism. Could the division prefigure a split in the Catholic Church?

Leo on Sunday delivered his “strongest condemnation yet” of war in a peace vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica, said CBS News. “Enough with war!” he said during the public service. Real strength is “manifested in serving life.” The president did not take kindly to the critique. Leo is “terrible for foreign policy” and should “get his act together as pope, use common sense, stop catering to the radical left,” Trump said on Truth Social.

The exchange followed a “bitter lecture” during a January meeting between Pentagon appointees and a Vatican diplomat, said The Free Press. The message from Defense Department officials: The church “had better take its side” on the world stage. One unnamed U.S. official “went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy,” the 14th-century period in which the French monarchy forcibly moved the papacy from Rome to France. Both sides downplayed the Free Press report. Even so, tension between Catholic leaders and the White House has “only risen since the start of the war with Iran,” said The Atlantic.

What did the commentators say?

“There will be no second Avignon,” Christopher Hale said at the newsletter Letters from Leo. Officials invoking that 14th-century history were making a “threat against the conscience of the world,” but the White House will be unable to repeat it.

A recent favorability survey published by NBC News found Leo finished first in a ranking of “14 public figures, institutions and political groups” by a wide margin. That makes him the “most popular public figure on earth.” Trump cannot compete. “The American people stand with Pope Leo XIV.”

Leo has “resisted Trump like a protester at a ‘No Kings’ rally,” said Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times. Critics will accuse the pope of “Trump derangement syndrome” and note that he stands “athwart the desires” of the 55% of Catholics who voted for the president in 2024. But Trump’s administration has pulled funding from Catholic charities and criticized bishops who dissent. Leo’s role is to “bear witness to the words of Christ,” who spoke more about caring for the poor than waging war. Unlike Trump, Leo “urges us to stand for something other than ourselves.”

What next?

The debate over the war is spilling into the wider religious sphere, “driving a wedge” between the president’s pro-Israel evangelical supporters and the Catholic commentators who are “increasingly hostile to Trump’s foreign policy agenda,” said Vox. The “Avignon-gate” report will continue to raise tensions “within the U.S. Catholic community and within the MAGA movement.”

Leo, meanwhile, will not return to the U.S. for the country’s 250th birthday celebrations in July, choosing instead to minister to migrants in Italy. Leo’s priority is to “be with those who are downcast and marginalized,” said Cardinal Blase Cupich on “60 Minutes.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Sunday sharply criticized Pope Leo XIV, an increasingly vocal opponent of his Iran war. The first U.S.-born Catholic pontiff is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump said on social media. “I’m not a fan of Pope Leo,” he told reporters. “He’s a very liberal person.” Shortly afterward, Trump posted an AI-generated image “depicting himself as a Christ-like figure healing a sick person with American flags and eagles in the background,” CNN said.

Who said what

Trump’s “angry counterpunch to the soft-spoken Leo” starkly “illustrated how differently two of the world’s most powerful Americans handle conflict,” The New York Times said. Trump’s broadside came after the pope held a vigil for peace at the Vatican on Saturday and suggested that a “delusion of omnipotence” was fueling the war. “Enough of the idolatry of self and money!” Leo said. “Enough of war!”

It’s “not unusual for popes and presidents to be at cross purposes,” The Associated Press said, but it’s “exceedingly rare” for them to openly criticize each other. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a statement he was “disheartened” at Trump’s “disparaging words about the Holy Father.”

What next?

Trump’s “extraordinary public criticism” of the pope could put him “at odds with some Catholics, tens of millions of whom live in the U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal said. Pope Leo leaves Monday for a four-country tour of Africa, Catholicism’s fastest-growing region.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz after peace talks with Iran in Pakistan failed to produce a breakthrough. The U.S. Navy will blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait,” he said on social media. But U.S. Central Command had a different interpretation of Trump’s order, saying it would block only vessels entering or departing “Iranian ports and coastal areas,” starting this week.

Who said what

A U.S. naval blockade would cut off a “key source of financing for Iran’s government and military operations,” CNN said. But a blockade could be a “blow to the rest of the world as well,” exacerbating the “war-driven global energy crisis” and raising U.S. gas prices, The Washington Post said.

The problem for Trump is that “Americans have a much lower threshold of pain than the Iranians,” Andreas Krieg, a security expert at King's College London, said to The Associated Press. The Iranians “can sustain this for far longer than the world economy” and “the Americans,” and Trump doesn’t have “any tool in the toolbox in terms of the military lever” he can use “to get his way.”

What next?

The face-to-face peace talks, led on the U.S. side by Vice President JD Vance, “were the highest-level negotiations between the longtime rivals” since 1979, the AP said. Iran said it was open to continuing the talks, and “neither indicated what will happen after the ceasefire expires on April 22.”

The price of crude oil could rise to $150 a barrel under a US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Jorge Montepeque, managing director of oil traders Onyx Capital Group, said prices “should be $140, $150” if the naval blockade goes ahead, said The Telegraph.

The US blockade was due to begin at 3pm today UK time. Writing on social media, Donald Trump said that the US was going to start “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz” and will “interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran”.

How will it work?

Under Trump’s plan, instead of having navy ships escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, US forces will board and potentially seize any vessels that pay Iran’s toll, a move that would effectively close the strait off entirely.

The US Central Command said that its forces would not impede the freedom of vessels travelling to and from non-Iranian ports. It also pledged that it would release additional information to commercial mariners.

The president warned that “any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL”, but “at some point” an agreement on free passage would be reached. He said that other countries would be involved in blockading the strait, but did not specify which. Keir Starmer said the UK would not join the blockade.

What will the effect be?

The consequences for the global economy could be serious. There’s “little clarity” about how the US navy will take control of the strait without “reigniting” the conflict with Iran and “causing another shockwave” in the money markets, said Michael Evans in The Times.

The blockade “might risk worsening a war-driven global energy crisis”, said The Washington Post. Although Iran would “potentially suffer the most economically”, it may also “come as a blow to the rest of the world”, particularly nations in Asia, which “rely heavily” on oil and gas from the Gulf.

So the president is “once again playing loose with the fortunes of financial markets and the global economy as he struggles to find a way out of the war”, said Australia’s ABC News.

As for Trump, the plan “reflects his hope” that he can repeat the “model of his intervention” in Venezuela, said the Financial Times. There, the US “seized” the then president Nicolás Maduro in a military operation after a naval blockade of the Latin American nation.

“You saw what we did with Venezuela,” Trump told Fox News. “It’ll be something very similar to that, but at a higher level.”

What did experts say?

Initially, Trump’s plan will only affect the small number of vessels that are still navigating the waterway, shipping expert Lars Jensen told the BBC. If the US does blockade the strait, it will “halt a very tiny trickle” of vessels and “in the greater scheme of things, it doesn’t really change anything”.

But three legal experts in the US said the blockade could violate maritime law. One of them suggested the blockade, which will be enforced militarily, would violate the current ceasefire agreement.

The blockade is a good “counterpoint” to Iran’s closure of the strait, Dennis Ross, the former senior US diplomat and Middle East negotiator, said on X. It puts “greater pressure on Iran” and “great pressure on China to pressure Iran”.

But Vali Nasr, a former US official and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Financial Times that the plan will be “fine by the Iranians” because it “prolongs the chokehold on the global economy”.

Tehran might respond by shutting down the Bab el-Mandeb, a chokepoint off the coast of Yemen, said Nasr, and “then the US will have to deal with that”.

Viktor Orbán once described Hungary under his premiership as a “petri dish for illiberalism”. The end of his 16-year reign is, for many in the West, a sign that his Maga-style politics is on the way out. But Hungary’s future under new prime minister Peter Magyar, once a staunch Orbán loyalist, is far from certain.

Magyar only joined the centre-right Tisza party in 2024. “He has built an opposition movement at amazing speed,” Gábor Győri of Budapest think tank, Policy Solutions, told The Guardian. “Never”, since the fall of Soviet-based communist rule in 1989, has Hungary “seen a party rise this quickly”.

What the commentators said?

“Short of offering a bonanza of free oil,” it’s hard to see how Donald Trump could have done more to “shore up” Orbán, his “closest ideological ally in Europe”, said Oliver Moody and Michael Evans in The Times. He promised to strengthen Hungary with “the full economic might” of the US, and even parachuted J.D. Vance into Budapest to stand at Orbán’s side. But Hungary’s rejection of Orbán is a reflection of the broader sentiment across Europe, as “the populist right is either distancing itself from Trump or suffering by association with his brand”.

“There is no question that Orbán’s downfall is a loss for Maga-style politics,” said Alexander Burns on Politico. But “the sharpest message from Budapest should be for the Democrats” in the US. Orbán’s defeat is “a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics”, in which reformists “launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete”. Currently, “there is no equivalent figure among Trump’s American opponents”.

There are warnings, too, for those in Europe who see Magyar’s win as a victory for liberal politics. Orbán’s fall “​​does not mean that Hungarian voters have rejected his tough-on-immigration, pro-natalist or Brussels-critical policies”, said The Telegraph’s deputy comment editor Michael Mosbacher. A former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, Magyar is a social conservative who “on effectively every issue” comes down “firmly on the right of European politics”. Orbán may have been the EU’s bête noire over financial support for Ukraine, but his successor has said in the past that he is against sending weapons to Kyiv and opposes Ukraine’s push to join the EU.

What next?

“Despite more than two years of campaigning and a 240-page election manifesto, the details of what exactly Magyar will do remain vague,” said The Guardian. “He is very much a dark horse,” Győri told the paper. “We don’t know much about him.”

“There are both question marks and exclamation marks” about the consequences of Magyar’s victory, said Ákos Hadházy, an independent Hungarian MP and a long-time critic of Orbán. “But Hungarian society has accepted this.”

Might the war in Iran “do what even Vladimir Putin couldn’t and blow up the North Atlantic Treaty alliance”, asked The Wall Street Journal. It’s “no longer an idle question”. Last week, President Trump vented his deep frustration with Nato, dismissing it as a “paper tiger” and declaring he is now “strongly considering” pulling the US out. If he does, it would be the “dumbest alliance breakup in modern history” – and it would be Europe’s fault.

‘Two-way street’

Spain and Italy blocked US military flights from their bases and Emmanuel Macron prevented use of France’s airspace. “Add its reluctance to help clear the Strait of Hormuz, and Europe is playing into every Maga stereotype about a one-sided Western alliance.” Europe’s reluctance to get involved is understandable, given Trump’s erratic policies and his failure to consult allies about the war. But it could have been more helpful. After all, it has its own interests to protect in the Middle East, and it would have shown that the alliance is “a two-way street”.

Our so-called “allies” have spent decades “free-riding on the US security umbrella”, said Josh Hammer in Newsweek: Trump is just saying so plainly. The “imbalance is staggering”: US defence spending accounts for 60% of Nato’s total. It’s clear that the “status quo is no longer defensible – and deep down, everyone knows it”.

Despite America’s frustrations, maintaining the alliance is still in its interests, said Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph. Nato gives the US access to a large network of naval, air and ground force bases – Nato’s top commander in Europe, an American, has gone so far as to say that US power projection depends on its European allies. Nevertheless, European leaders must convince the Trump administration that it is in Washington’s interests to stay in.

Damage is done

The severity of the threat should not be underestimated, said Roland Oliphant in the same paper. The US is not just the biggest member, it is “the lynchpin”, around which the whole edifice is constructed. It has capabilities, in satellite and signals intelligence, in missile defence, that the rest rely heavily on. If it abandons the alliance, the chances of Putin taking a gamble on attacking Europe “would increase substantially”.

“In literal terms, it would be near-impossible” for Trump to leave Nato, said The Independent. In 2023, Congress passed a law that means the US can only leave with the approval of the Senate, and there is little appetite among Republicans for this. But that wouldn’t prevent the US from “quiet quitting”. It could withdraw troops from Germany or simply “ignore its Article 5 duties to defend, for example, Estonia”.

The damage is already done, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. Trump hasn’t just undermined Nato’s collective security guarantee; he has betrayed Ukraine and threatened to invade Greenland. “Trust is gone.” Europe must build up its own security arrangements immediately. There is no guarantee that Europe “will have an ally across the Atlantic” again any day soon.

A chorus of high-profile right-wing figureheads including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones recently criticized President Donald Trump’s ongoing Iran war. The president responded by denouncing them as “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS” in a lengthy social media statement, essentially making them persona non-MAGA. But as the president struggles to contain blowback from his Middle Eastern adventurism, the MAGA fault lines are only growing.

The ‘biggest break thus far’

After several MAGA figures denounced the president’s actions in the Middle East and, in some cases, his presidency overall, Trump responded with a “blistering” 482-word Truth Social post that insulted them in “starkly personal terms,” The New York Times said. Trump’s missive came after “weeks of criticism” from the consortium of conservative figureheads, which he had “largely ignored” before this latest outburst. Jones, Kelly, Carlson and former Charlie Kirk collaborator Candace Owens are the “opposite of MAGA,” Trump said, before he began “insulting the pundits personally,” said The Hill.

Trump has “repeatedly dismissed suggestions” of an alleged “fissure in his MAGA coalition,” Forbes said. But criticism from MAGA notables “intensified” after Trump “threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization,” NBC News said. There is now a “growing schism within Trump’s base” over the Iran war, “particularly” given his campaign pledge of “no new wars.”

While Carlson in particular has been “highly critical” of the Iran conflict and “somewhat more gently critical of Trump the man, at least publicly,” the “gloves were off” this week “like never before,” said CNN. The result is “perhaps the biggest break thus far” between Trump and a “leading conservative influencer,” even as the GOP has “done its best to forestall these kinds of splits.” Carlson’s critiques won’t “suddenly equally divide Trump’s base,” but they are an “inauspicious sign” and “not helpful” for the party.

‘Deep anger’ and ‘quick rebukes’

Trump’s attacks on this batch of newly minted detractors reflect what seems to be a “deep anger” at once-loyal supporters, said Politico. The opprobrium runs both ways, as the targets of his ire offered “quick rebukes” to Trump’s attacks. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” Owens said in a “one-line quip” on X, said Forbes. “I’m just so sad that whatever’s happened to him has totally changed the man he once was,” said Jones in a video response on the same platform.

Iran has clearly “emerged as a growing weakness” for Trump, said CNN. While some MAGA supporters are “overwhelmingly on board,” the president’s wider base is “increasingly on a different page.” For Trump, the danger in rebukes by Carlson and other media figures is that it gives Republicans “skeptical of the war license to tilt into outright opposition to him.”

President Donald Trump loves raging against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, regularly chiding the military partnership for alleged financial delinquencies while at the same time boosting the interests of NATO’s primary antagonist, Russia. Now, as the U.S.’s war on Iran continues, NATO’s ostensible neutrality in that conflict has prompted him to renew his threat of leaving the organization altogether. Trump often tries to dictate reality by presidential fiat, but the legal process for leaving NATO is largely out of his hands and in Congress.’ The result is a Trump who’s more constrained on paper but not without a toolbox of other, less absolute options.

Why can’t Trump just leave NATO?

Trump has often threatened to leave the military alliance, but he has his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, to thank for the legal inability to do so. In 2023, Congress enacted what “appears to be the first statute prohibiting the president from unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty (specifically, the North Atlantic Treaty),” said the government’s Congressional Research Service in a February 2026 report. This “might be understood as a rejection” of the position that presidents possess “exclusive power over treaty withdrawal.”

The bill ensures presidents cannot exit NATO “without rigorous debate and consideration by the U.S. Congress with the input of the American people,” said co-sponsor Rubio in a statement on Senator Tim Kaine’s site; Kaine (D-Va.) was the amendment’s other sponsor. Before this, any member nation could exit the treaty one year after notifying the U.S., which would then “inform the governments of the other parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation,” said the NATO charter.

Per the bill, a bipartisan effort for which Rubio partnered with Kaine and others from across the aisle, a president may only exit NATO “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the senators present concur or pursuant to an Act of Congress.” This is a virtual impossibility, given the Democrats’ current holdings in the upper chamber.

The 2023 effort was “spurred by worries that Trump, if he returned to power, might try to quit the alliance,” said The Washington Post. Fast forward three years, and Trump “insists he would be able to do it anyway,” said Deutsche Welle.

What can he do then?

While it’s possible a constitutional challenge to Rubio’s 2023 bill would “likely favor the power of a president,” there are still “plenty of ways” Trump could “kneecap” the treaty “without leaving” or complying with the congressional restrictions, said DW. Even without an “official exit,” Trump’s “increasingly hostile stance toward the alliance may leave it weakened,” said CBS News.

If other member nations “can’t trust” that the U.S. will honor the treaty’s Article 5 mutual defense pact, then the alliance is “already broken in the way that matters most,” said political scientist Ian Bremmer on X. As soon as the group’s mutual defense pact is “questioned,” NATO “loses its potency” as a Russian deterrent, said Politico. Trump has, in that respect, “turned doubting NATO into official policy.”

The president is also “considering a plan to punish” some NATO member nations he deemed “unhelpful” during the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, said The Wall Street Journal. This would involve relocating some of the 84,000 American troops stationed in Europe and deploying them to “countries that were more supportive,” including Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

Trump could also withdraw American military assets entirely and shut off funding for NATO operations. Or if he wants to be “very dramatic,” he might even “decide not to staff the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe,” a post traditionally reserved for American officers, said DW.

The president could “just downgrade our participation,” said Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Europe and NATO policy, to Politico. He could skip summits, and the secretary of defense “won’t go to defense ministerials.”

With the “language” of its 2023 bill, Congress has “prevented” a “total” and “formal withdrawal from NATO,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to Politico. But the U.S. could “still be in NATO” with a president grasping “many different levers” so that the country’s impact would nevertheless be “diminished significantly.”

After five weeks of war, Donald Trump has claimed “total and complete victory” over Iran. Tehran begs to differ. Agreeing to the conditional two-week ceasefire, Iranian officials said their country had dealt a “crushing historic defeat” to the US and Israel.

Meanwhile, commentators are pointing to real, quiet wins for both China and Pakistan, whose behind-the-scenes roles in pushing for the ceasefire have increased their global standing.

What did the commentators say?

Benjamin Netanyahu “looks set to be the biggest loser” of the conflict, said The Guardian’s senior international correspondent, Peter Beaumont. Pressuring Trump to agree to his decades-long goal of neutralising Iran has “turned out to be a bust”. The “political consensus” between Israel and the US is “visibly crumbling”, and there’s “domestic fallout” for Netanyahu in the run-up to an election.

Trump has also emerged as a “strategic loser”, said the South China Morning Post. Washington failed to achieve regime change in Tehran, and Iran retained control of the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict’s “most strategic asset”. Meanwhile, the US has used up “sophisticated air-defence missiles” intercepting “far cheaper Iranian drones and projectiles”. Iran’s nuclear programme has survived, along with the “stockpile of enriched uranium” from which it could “potentially produce a viable weapon”, said The Times’ Middle East correspondent, Samer Al-Atrush. That “will not be given up easily”.

Tehran’s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was a “high-risk” strategy that “paid off”, said DW. It “secured a ceasefire without conceding defeat”, which it “can present as proof that it withstood the US and all its military might”. The Iranian regime “survived, and bought time to try to shape” the phase of negotiations “on more favourable terms”.

In the longer term, it is actually Beijing that most “stands to gain”. America has “moved many military assets to the Middle East to protect shipping”, which “leaves fewer resources for the Indo‑Pacific, where Washington and Beijing compete for influence”. China has also had the chance to present itself “as a responsible global actor”, with its power brokers widely credited with pushing Iran to agree to the ceasefire.

China is “shaping up to be the big winner”, said Roger Boyes, The Times’ diplomatic editor. Unlike the US, it expected Iran to seize the strait and “amassed large oil reserves”, making itself “more resilient” to an energy crisis. “As a significant exporter” of other goods, it was still initially “hit hard” by the strait’s closure but then the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ordered that China-bound vessels could pass through “toll-free”.

Pakistan’s credentials have been burnished, too. Its role in brokering the ceasefire was “unexpected” but the Islamabad Accord is the country’s “most consequential diplomatic moment in a decade”, said former UN peacekeeper Anil Raman on NDTV. Capitalising on its good relations with both the US and Iran, Islamabad will “press hard to consolidate” this “return to global relevance”.

What next?

J.D. Vance is due to lead a US delegation in negotiations with Tehran in Pakistan this weekend. The White House said the ceasefire between the US and Iran has created an “opening for a diplomatic solution and long-term peace”.

But the specifics of the terms to be discussed “remain murky”, said the BBC, “as is the current state of shipping traffic” through the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian forces have warned that ships would be “destroyed” if they tried to sail through without permission.

Donald Trump’s political rivals have denounced him as an “unhinged madman” and a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” after he directed a string of expletives at the Iranian regime. “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” the US president said on his Truth Social platform .

But Trump is far from the only potty-mouthed politician, and trends suggest that swearing in politics is increasingly going from taboo to mainstream.

‘Profanity seal’

Woodrow Wilson “broke the profanity seal” in 1919, when the then president recalled a time he made a “conspicuous ass of himself”, said Joseph Phillips, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “Since then, presidents, their seconds-in-command, and presidential hopefuls have used profanity at least 692 times” – but the vast majority of curse words, 87%, occurred in the last 10 years.

We’ve “come a long way from our shock” at John Major, not knowing he was being recorded, using the word “bastards” while prime minister in 1993, said Robert Crampton in The Times. Although “tough talk is nothing new in politics”, leaders “long avoided flaunting it”, said The Independent. But now, public vulgarity is “in vogue”. During a political rally in 2025, Trump “used profanity at least four times”. J.D. Vance has also sworn publicly, and former vice president Kamala Harris “earned a roar of approval from her audience” last October when she said of the Trump administration that “these mother******* are crazy”.

Members of Congress and the Senate have also sworn as a “volley of vulgarities underscores an ever-coarsening political environment” on social media. Posts that “evoke the strongest emotions are rewarded with the most engagement”.

‘Anti-intellectualism’

There’s a “misguided belief” that “profanity is more ‘honest’ or ‘authentic’ than polite speech”, said Solomon D. Stevens in the Illinois paper the Journal-Courier. This suggests that politicians who swear are “telling it like it is” or “being real”, while those who don’t must be “holding back and not telling the truth”. But “politicians who swear are just politicians who swear. They can lie just as easily as those who don’t swear.”

There’s also “an anti-intellectualism at work”, as politicians who swear imply that those who don’t are “putting on airs”. While some intellectuals can “certainly be pretentious”, “refraining from coarse language” is not in itself a sign of that.

Trump’s “disinhibited language” sounded like a “tantrum”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. It “suggested that he’d lost self-control because Iran wouldn’t do what he wanted”. Swearing points to an “emotional release and thus a loss of reason”.

The president’s recent profanity also distracted from “the message itself”, said the Deseret News. A “rousing and well-crafted argument” could have “built a compelling case for ousting the country’s ruling regime”, because “when it comes to war, calm self-assurance speaks louder than ranting expletives”.

Politicians aren’t “bawling swear words because they can’t contain their outrage”, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. They do it because, “like preteen boys trying to sound tough”, they believe “the odd public expletive enhances their authenticity” and gives them “an air of pugnacity apropos to the moment”. But they are mistaken. “Most Americans still prefer their leaders to talk like grown-ups.”

Nevertheless, Democrats are pushing back against the right, using bad language themselves and embracing more confrontational and crass tactics. They see it as a way to beat Maga at its own game, attempting to “step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”, said The New York Times.

The United States under President Donald Trump is, for the time being, the brightest star in a growing network of ultra-nationalist governments hoping to reshape the global order in their authoritarian mold. While MAGA America is the powerhouse, it’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary that has been the backbone of the worldwide lurch rightward. Yet as Hungarians prepare to vote on April 12, Orbán and his Fidesz party seem headed for an electoral upset that could send shock waves across hard-right spheres.

Government ‘revered by authoritarians everywhere’

A “pro-Kremlin, anti-EU strongman” who has spent nearly two decades “building a template for Christian nationalist rule,” Orbán is now the “cornerstone of President Trump’s vision for Europe,” Axios said. In the 16 years since he was first elected, Orbán forged a “state apparatus — courts, media, election administration — loyal to his party” and has “never lost under the system he built.”

As the “center of the Trump administration’s shifting policy toward Europe,” Orbán’s Hungary “firmly” aligned itself with “far-right parties and immigration restrictionists in countries such as France and Germany,” said Al Jazeera. While this has “mired relationships in Europe,” it has also been a “source of inspiration for the U.S.”

“Whatever Hungary decides will resonate throughout Europe,” said Argentine President Javier Milei, a South American nationalist, during his address at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest. Orbán is a “beacon” for those who “refuse to accept that the West’s destiny is one of managed decline.”

CPAC-Hungary, where Milei spoke, has become an “important calendar event for Euro-Atlantic hard-right networking,” said Balkan Insight. The event hosted “667 foreign guests from 51 countries” who heard from “prominent European political figures” such as far-right Dutch PVV leader Geert Wilders and Alice Weidel of Germany’s ultra-nationalist AfD. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while initially scheduled to appear in person, instead sent a “warm message of support” in pretaped remarks played on the conference’s first day, Cleveland Jewish News said.

Orbán is “revered by authoritarians everywhere,” said Salon. But as a “path-breaking autocrat” who has demonstrated a “new soft fascism,” his potential loss is making many of those same authoritarians “nervous.”

Effects that would ‘reverberate well beyond Hungary’

Should Orbán’s government fall, the “dreams” of his authoritarian admirers in the MAGA movement “might be shattered” as well, said Vox. As a “close Russian ally,” Orbán’s loss would be a “considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.” Cumulatively, then, Hungary’s elections are “not just like any other vote,” and could end up as “one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade.”

An Orbán loss would prompt authoritarian allies to ask “what it could mean for them,” said Salon. “After all,” his “anti-democratic” domestic policies were designed to “not only prevent a defeat from happening” but to “keep people from ever wanting it to happen.” Such a defeat would “reverberate well beyond Hungary,” calling into question the “durability of a political system” marked by “hardline nationalism and an erosion of democratic checks” and “touted as a blueprint for reshaping Western democracy” by many conservatives, said Reuters.

“I am here for a simple reason,” Vice President JD Vance said at a pro-Orbán rally in Budapest this week: “I admire what you are fighting for.” But Vance’s visit may have ultimately done “more harm for Orbán than good,” The Guardian said. By asserting that the Trump administration would work with any eventual Hungarian elected leader, the vice president seemingly undercut Orbán’s campaign promise that “he — and his connections — were the only means of keeping Hungary safe in a volatile world.”

For some observers, Vance’s visit is unlikely to change the electoral calculus in Hungary, where “domestic issues such as the ⁠cost of living dominate the election,” said Reuters. No matter what happens in Hungary’s immediate future, Orbán’s global footprint will surely be felt for years to come.

Endorsements are designed to help a candidate win. But President Trump’s endorsement this week of California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton may have the paradoxical effect of keeping Golden State power in Democratic hands.

Trump’s decision to back Hilton could keep Democrats “from an embarrassing lockout” in the June primary election, said Politico. Candidates from both parties compete together in the primary election, with the top two — regardless of party — advancing to the November general election. Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco had a chance of creating a “Republican-on-Republican general election,” but Trump’s endorsement seems likely to send GOP voter support mostly to Hilton, away from Bianco, and give Democrats an opening for the second slot. It is “weird to feel thankful for a Trump action,” said the anonymous head of a Democrat-aligned group to Politico.

The Hilton backing is the latest twist in an “unusually messy” campaign to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, said The New York Times. Aside from Hilton and Bianco, the slate includes “eight prominent Democrats” who created a field “so fractured that no clear front-runner has emerged.” The result: Democrats were “increasingly panicked” about the possibility of a GOP-only November election. Trump “may have solved their problem.”

What did the commentators say?

GOP voters are “badly outnumbered in California” Matthew Hennessey said at The Wall Street Journal. Democrats have twice the number of registered voters as Republicans in the state. The key to pulling off a Democratic lockout, then, was “keeping the split between the two Republicans relatively even” while letting their opponents divvy up voters eight ways. The president’s endorsement means the “dream of a complete Democratic lockout is probably over.”

Trump forgot that one should “never interrupt your opponent while he’s making a mistake,” Noah Rothman said at the National Review. Two Republicans facing off to win the governorship of a famously Democratic state would have produced the “funniest of all possible results” for conservatives. That was an “unlikely” outcome, but the prospect might have forced Democrats to spend millions to avoid it. The president’s intervention means the California campaign is much “less interesting” than it might have been. “It was funny while it lasted.”

California is already in the midst of the “weirdest campaign for governor in recent history,” Dan Waters said at CalMatters. But Trump’s support for Hilton “does not absolutely close the door” to an all-GOP general election. The “top tier” of Democrats includes Rep. Eric Swalwell, former Rep. Katie Porter and billionaire Tom Steyer. Without a breakthrough by one of them, Republicans could still win both slots despite “Trump’s tactically foolish intervention.” Time is running short. “The clock is ticking.”

What next?

Trump’s endorsement will help Hilton “coalesce conservative support” in the primary but could “become a liability” in a general election campaign against a Democrat, said The Associated Press. Hilton remains a long shot anyway: GOP candidates have “not won a statewide election in California in two decades.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening said he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, subject to a “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” The announcement defused his threat from earlier in the day that “a whole civilization will die tonight” absent a deal.

Iran said it would abide by the ceasefire, proposed by Pakistan, but maintain control of the Strait of Hormuz. Israel also agreed to stop attacking Iran, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday morning the “ceasefire does not include Lebanon,” contradicting an earlier statement from Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Who said what

Iranian state TV said Trump had accepted Iran’s terms in a “humiliating retreat.” Trump told APF that the ceasefire was “100%” a “total and complete victory” for the U.S. His “apocalyptic threat” of civilizational erasure “certainly helped him find” the “offramp he had been seeking for weeks,” said The New York Times. But his “down-to-the-wire tactical victory” resolved “none of the fundamental issues that led to the war.”

The ceasefire’s terms were “clouded in uncertainty,” The Associated Press said. Trump said on social media that Iran’s 10-point plan was “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” But that plan appears to cross several of Trump’s red lines. Notably, Iran and Oman “plan to charge transit fees for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz,” CNN said, something that wasn’t in place before the war. Iran’s caveat that “safe passage” through the strait was contingent on “coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces” and “technical limitations” means Iran will keep the “power to speed up passage, or slow it down,” The Wall Street Journal said. The U.S. will be “helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted. “Big money will be made,” and “Iran can start the reconstruction process.”

What next?

The “ceasefire appeared shaky in its early hours,” Politico said, with Iran firing missiles at Gulf Arab countries and Israel continuing to strike Iran. The U.S. and Iran “are expected to hold peace talks on Friday in Islamabad,” Axios said.

“In the end, cooler heads prevailed – at least for now,” said North America Correspondent Anthony Zurcher on BBC News. After Donald Trump’s threats to launch attacks on Iran that would wipe out the “whole civilisation” in the country, both countries agreed a two-week ceasefire.

The President has since claimed that this could lead to a “Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”, while Vice-President J. D. Vance called the ceasefire a “fragile truce”.

As peace talks are expected to take place in Pakistan, both sides have claimed the ascendancy, though uncertainty surrounding key elements of the agreement, such as the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian nuclear capabilities, have left many sceptical of continued peace.

What did the commentators say?

This ceasefire move is “check, not checkmate”, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. In fact, we shouldn’t even consider this a proper ceasefire; it is merely a “fragile” and “conditional” “pause” in the conflict, which is “already under strain”.

“Beneath the surface, fundamental disagreements persist” in a logistical sense. There has been “no clearly defined start time” and “key uncertainties” remain. The proposed 10-point plan issued by Iran contains “discrepancies” between its Farsi and English versions, “most notably” over the state of uranium enrichment, as well as ambiguity surrounding movement through the Strait of Hormuz. “If this is the Third World War, it is not over.”

“It’s TACO Tuesday!”, said David Charter in The Times, using the Trump Always Chickens Out acronym coined last year during Trump’s “on-off tariff threats”. Even if the ceasefire holds, the US has “left in place a cadre of battle-scarred leaders, no doubt harbouring thoughts of revenge”.

As “king of the ultimatum”, Trump has “played fast and loose in pursuit of his goals”, isolating himself from “shocked” allies, who are now “on their guard” more than ever before. The “reckless” flip-flopping could have “far-reaching consequences for America’s standing in the world”. On the world stage, countries may come to fear America’s “increasingly unpredictable behaviour” more than its “terrifying” military might.

“Both sides have good reason to hope the talks succeed, despite the obstacles,” said The Economist. For the US, the war is “deeply unpopular at home”, and Trump is “keen to have it finished” before his mid-May summit with Xi Jinping in China. “For Iran, renewed fighting would be catastrophic,” with America and Israel expected to continue striking key economic assets. The only outlier may be Israel, which maintained that the ceasefire does not include Lebanon.

“Diplomatic jujitsu” will be required to bridge the gap between the views of a final peace agreement held by Iran and the US, said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. It is hard to imagine that a settlement between the nations could be reached in “two years, much less two weeks”. Neither Trump’s “tactic of escalating his rhetoric to astronomical levels” or the “down-to-the-wire” negotiations have resolved the “fundamental issues that led to the war”. It took the Obama administration two-and-a-half years to negotiate the 2015 nuclear accord – which Trump tore up in 2018 – “and that was in peacetime”. Notwithstanding, “this negotiation will be held under the sword of a possible resumption of hostilities.”

The last-minute ceasefire is “in theory, a victory for real-estate geopolitics”, said Senior Foreign Correspondent Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. However, “as any real estate agent knows”, the devil is in the detail, and “closer inspection suggests Mr Trump’s triumph may not be quite as unalloyed as he claims”. Iran’s position is stronger than before the war, and has now “agreed to allow shipping through the chokepoint”, but “on its own terms and has not relinquished its claim to control it”. The country may have agreed to a ceasefire, but its negotiating position, “rhetorically at least, is now more hardline than before the war began”.

What next?

“What is certain is that the clock has been reset yet again,” said Sacerdoti in The Spectator. Providing the ceasefire holds, the “decisive moment” will come in two weeks’ time, when the “temporary pause” ends and the “question of whether it can be extended, or gives way to renewed fighting, will be answered”.

“The talks in Islamabad will be complicated, to say the least,” said The Economist. Significant work needs to be done, as the positions of both sides “could not be further apart”. “If both sides stick to their current positions, the talks could end up at the same impasse they reached just before the war in February.”

If talks were to fail, we would likely see an “uneasy return to the status quo”. Iran would face American sanctions and the continued “threat of further American strikes”, as well as remaining a “menace” in the Gulf region, and have “strong motivation to build a bomb”. “That would be a bad outcome for everyone: a weakened, hostile regime; an impoverished Iran; and a lingering threat to the global economy.”

Space programmes cost billions. By 2028, when the fourth mission in its current Artemis programme lands astronauts back on the Moon, Nasa will have spent $105 billion (£78 billion) – which is “a chunk of change”, said USA Today.

Spending so much seems puzzling “when we already did” the Moon thing: are “science, exploration and the possible value of moon materials” really worth it? Or would that all public money be better spent on ”healthcare or tax cuts”?

‘Futile pursuits of prestige’

“It’s absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless,” said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. And the more crises there are “besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes”. The US, “of all nations”, has got bigger issues right now, so “seriously, Nasa, can you not just knock it off”?

Ordinary Americans are tired of “these absurd expressions of vanity, these futile pursuits of prestige”, said space historian Gerard DeGroot on UnHerd. Even the Apollo missions in the late 1960s “were not as popular as Nasa pretended”: opinion polls showed “support was consistently below 50%”, with women, people of colour and the poor, in particular, questioning the “obscene cost”.

The current Artemis enterprise “reeks” of Elon Musk: his SpaceX Starship will have increasing involvement as the missions progress and, although the details of the deal are “shrouded in mystery”, it’s “safe to suspect that some quid pro quo is involved”. We know that SpaceX has received $17 billion (£12.6 billion) in government funding already.

Images to ‘catch the breath’

I've always thought the so-called “choice” between “advancing to the stars and solving problems back on earth” to be “a false one”, said Séamas O'Reilly in The New Statesman. Yes, the Artemis budget “may seem hard to justify” for what appears to be “a few rocket launches” and some “charming zero gravity footage of bulky astronauts surrounded by floating pens” but “this elides the truth” of the “titanic boost to science, technology and economies back home”.

Nasa’s Apollo programme “returned around $7 to the US economy for every $1 spent”. In all our homes, we can see “developments made at the bleeding edge of space”: if you have a laptop, a camera phone or a memory foam mattress, “you have Nasa to thank”. The same goes for advancements in water purification, landmine removal and artificial limbs – “not to mention the invention of ear thermometers and CAT scans”.

If those images beamed back from the Artemis II this week didn’t “catch the breath” in your throat, you can’t “be fully alive”, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. “The experience of seeing the Earth photographed from space” has “an effect on our collective imaginations”. The Apollo 8 “Earthrise” image, for example, is widely thought to have “kickstarted the modern environmental movement”.

Artemis II is “one small step towards living in deep space”, said evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon in The Washington Post. I see parallels between “establishing an enduring human presence” on the Moon (and, ultimately, Mars) and “the processes by which animals and plants” arrive on Earth’s islands and “evolve into new species”. Future generations living on other planets will “gradually become different from people on Earth”. And that will be “a giant leap for all humanity”.

Donald Trump’s threats to wipe out a civilisation and Israel’s alleged use of white phosphorus in Lebanon have once again shone a spotlight on the rules of war.

“Collective punishment on a population and the targeting of protected civilian infrastructure are prohibited under international law,” legal experts told ABC News of Trump’s threats, while his promises to take the country’s oil, “which could amount to pillaging” is also “barred under the law”.

In Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said it was able to verify that Israel was again using the “notorious weapon”, “reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war”, said The Guardian.

When asked whether his threats constituted a war crime, Donald Trump answered, “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon”.

So what constitutes a ‘war crime’?

War crimes are “violations of international humanitarian law” that, unlike genocide and crimes against humanity, “always take place in the context of an armed conflict, whether international or not”, said the United Nations.

These include cases of murder, torture, pillage, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and non-combatants such as humanitarian aid workers, as well as the deliberate targeting of religious and educational buildings, hospitals and, in some cases, vital infrastructure such as power stations and key transport links.

The use of weapons banned by international conventions, such as chemical weapons or cluster munitions, can also be considered a war crime.

What are the major conventions and treaties?

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols introduced in subsequent decades are international treaties that serve as the “most important rules limiting the barbarity of war”, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Ratified by all 196 UN member states, in times of war they protect non-combatants, such as civilians, medics, aid workers, and those who can no longer fight, including the wounded, sick or prisoners of war.

There are also additional conventions banning the use of biological weapons (1972), certain conventional weapons (1980), chemical weapons (1993), anti-personnel mines (1997), and cluster munitions (2008).

What happens if someone breaks the rules?

The International Criminal Court (ICC), established under the Rome Statute in 2002, “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression”.

“Champions of the court say it deters would-be war criminals, bolsters the rule of law, and offers justice to victims of atrocities,” said the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank. Yet it has, since inception, also “faced criticism from many parties” and has been fundamentally weakened by the refusal of several major powers to join.

As well as the US, Russia and China, non-signatories include India, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Recent arrest warrants for national leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have “generated mixed reactions from Washington and raised questions over the future of the court”, said the CFR.

As “no formal ICC jurisdiction applies” to countries that have not signed up to the ICC, the “more immediate legal framework” remains the Geneva conventions of 1949 onwards, said The Guardian.

The Conventions and their Protocols contain stringent rules to deal with those who commit what are known as “grave breaches”, who must be pursued and tried or extradited, whatever their nationality.

The key point here, said Professor Andrew Clapham in OpionioJuris, is that the rules for offences deemed war crimes under the Geneva code apply to “everyone irrespective of whether their state has ratified the ICC Statute, and they can be tried in multiple states around the world, irrespective of whether those states are parties to the ICC Statute”.

“The idea that anyone can avoid accountability for grave breaches by sticking to non-ICC states for one’s trips is fallacious when that person is alleged to have committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”