FLAME-ON DON Faces Ceasefires Broken and Mega MAGA Meltdowns All around him
The president lividly expressed his fury today as the ceasefire he boasted about appeared to end as soon as it began or maybe to have never begun at all.
Did Trumpian lies hit a new climax, or are the ceasefire contradictions just the fog of war? Iran said this morning there is no ceasefire, never was a ceasefire. They even claimed Trump was lying to try to force a ceasefire into play, and to prove its point Iran lobbed some more missiles into Israel.
So, the story started off this morning, anyway, as Bill Bonner provided the following synopsis of what sounded like a fake-news ceasefire:
The big news came this morning. Huffington Post:
“Donald Trump has announced a ceasefire between Israel [and] Iran is “now in effect” after days of intense bombardments.
“It comes after the US waded into the regional conflict, siding with Israel by launching strikes on Iran’s three nuclear facilities on Saturday.
“The US president wrote on Truth Social at 6:08 BST... ‘THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!’”
But wait…
Minutes later… was this fake news? The Tehran Times:
Iran has not agreed to a ceasefire. Trump is lying again
“The president appears to be making up a new lie to force the Iranian government into accepting a ceasefire, believing that the move could pit the Iranian people against the officials and create domestic dissent.”
How much of this war is real? How much is fake?
As if to prove its case that Trump’s announcement was totally fake, Iran did the following:
Iranian missile barrage strikes Israel after deadline Trump announced for ceasefire passes
…an Iranian missile barrage struck Israel after a first deadline for the proposal.
The Iranian barrages sent Israelis hurrying into bomb shelters as the sun rose, killing at least four people and injuring eight others.
This article, however, says the opposite—that Iran did acknowledge the ceasefire and Israel did not:
Israel has yet to acknowledge Trump’s proposal, which gives Israel more time to potentially strike back though Iran on its state television announced an overall ceasefire had begun at 7:30 a.m. local time.
And strike back Israel did, using its period of refusal to announce the ceasefire to seize the moment with a massive barrage of its own, according to Donald Trump, who fired back some intense words at Israel.
“A complete and total ceasefire” the president had announced yesterday “Complete and total, except only one side agreed to it … or maybe neither side agreed … or, at least, it is not so total as not to be stretched to its limits for a little extra firing time:
Israel did not immediately acknowledge any ceasefire, but there were no reports of Israeli strikes in Iran after 4 a.m. in Tehran. Heavy Israeli strikes continued in Iranian cities until shortly before that time. Israel in other conflicts has stepped up its strikes just before ceasefires took effect.
“As of now, there is NO ‘agreement’ on any ceasefire or cessation of military operations,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a post on X. “However, provided that the Israeli regime stops its illegal aggression against the Iranian people no later than 4 am Tehran time, we have no intention to continue our response afterwards….”
The White House has maintained that the Saturday bombing helped get the Israelis to agree to the ceasefire and that the Qatari government helped to broker the deal.
It’s unclear what role Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s leader, played in the talks. He said earlier on social media that he would not surrender.
The tenuous and almost unbelievable nature of Trump’s ceasefire, is why I wrote yesterday,
In my view, it seems more likely that the worst is not behind us, but that Trump’s hyuge, bold move may put the worst ahead of us….
I would point out … back when Iran said it was going to retaliate against some of Israel’s former missile attacks, the counter-attack took more than a day to finally show up. Iran could be using Trump’s own tactics to buy time—the tactics where Trump talked about the need for Iran to negotiate and said he was giving it two weeks to do so, even as the Pentagon was carefully putting the finishing touches on a plan that would torch Iran’s nuke plants in just a couple of days. They could be trying to get us to lower our guard a little and aiming for a serious surprise….
For a few more days anyway, I’m still looking and listening for the Trojan horse to roll up to the gate.
Trump appeared to have gotten that surprise this morning, and he was “not happy” with any of it:
Trump Goes Absolutely Berserk on Iran and Israel as Ceasefire Deal Crumbles: ‘They Don’t Know What the F*ck They’re Doing’
Or maybe they did know what they were doing. Maybe they never agreed to anything. Or maybe they are school kids going back to the brawl after being pulled off of each other.
Speaking to reporters before takeoff, the president said that both Israel and Iran had breached the terms of the truce and made clear he was “not pleased” with Israel’s promise to launch retaliatory airstrikes after agreeing to the deal.
The president’s rage flamed on as he exploded in expletive fury, claiming the ceasefire was broken by both sides:
Now, this is somewhat the nature of ceasefires. They are particularly fragile at the start, but the size of Israel’s attack as soon as the ceasefire was announced by the president certainly doesn’t seem like they were attempting to honor a ceasefire.
The comments come as the Israeli military vowed to carry out “intense” retaliatory strikes on Tehran following ballistic missile attacks from Iran that struck Beersheba on Tuesday morning, killing at least four civilians. In response, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered a “forceful” counteroffensive, targeting what he described as “the heart of Tehran….”
Tehran denied any role in the attacks. Iranian state media claimed that “reports published about missile launches from Iran toward the occupied territories after imposing a ceasefire on the Zionist regime are denied,” accusing Israel of fabricating the provocation.
Trump claimed that he became “firm and direct” in a call with Netanyahu after the breakdown of the ceasefire.
Accomplishments not as clear as Trump “Truthed”
Israel – which started the war – has officially accepted the deal, and Iran’s state television announced it around three hours before it was due to take effect.
While the President claimed three key nuclear sites had been ‘obliterated’, the Pentagon later said the extent of the damage was unclear as full assessments had not been completed.
Israeli Leader of the Opposition Yair Lapid told the UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee it would ‘take some time’ to learn what happened, adding: ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever know for sure.’
… affirming my obvious observation yesterday about Trump’s claim of “total” mission success:
I doubt we can actually know how badly damaged the facilities deep under ground are at this point because the wreckage through the blast hole would likely be impenetrable.
That was my penetrating glance into the obvious about Trump’s brash claim:
President Donald Trump has proclaimed that the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities was an unmitigated success.
“The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it,” he wrote in a social media post Monday.
The actual truth is in the title to that article. It has to be just on the basis of how difficult it is to ascertain what happened many meters below the ground:
“U.S. scrambles to determine impact of strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites”
…defense officials and nuclear experts are still trying to determine whether the strikes achieved their stated strategic goal of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program.
“Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a Sunday morning Pentagon briefing.
Under Defense Department guidelines, it could take days or even weeks for the U.S. military to complete a formal battle damage assessment, or BDA, primarily by using overhead surveillance to collect information from the sites of the blasts. But experts caution there are limits to what information can be gathered.
Hearing directly from Iranians discussing the damage, either through human intelligence gathered by sources in Tehran’s government or electronic interception of those conversations, would be among the best ways to assess the effects, although they are also among the most difficult methods.
“In lieu of highly vetted source intelligence, there is no real way to conduct any thorough” BDA, said Wes Bryant, who served as a targeter in Air Force Special Operations….
But “at this time, no one — including the IAEA — is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage” at Fordow, Grossi said. The agency won’t know, he added, until its inspectors still in Iran are able to return to the facility….
“Why am I not impressed?” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear and nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote in a lengthy post on X. The enriched uranium “was largely stored in underground tunnels. … Despite extensive Israeli and US attacks [on] the facility, there does not seem to have been any effort to destroy these tunnels or the material that was in them….”
“The point is they have material that they have made at other facilities,” Lewis said in an interview. “We don’t know what became of that.”
Lewis and others suggested that the United States was aware of the limitations of a military attack on the widespread Iranian nuclear program and was more interested in showing Tehran that Washington was prepared to use force to stop it.
“It is a loss for the Iranians,” Lewis said of the destruction at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz, “but it is not anything like the scale of the attack you would mount if the goal was really to eliminate the program.
“This problem has delayed them, and undoubtedly there must be things that have been destroyed that they now have to reconstitute,” he said, but the rebuilding could probably be done in no more than a year….
The bombs dropped on the Fordow site burrowed through the mountainside and exploded on a delayed timer, collapsing dirt and rock that conceal the full extent of the damage.
So, the president, as usual, talks bigger and more brashly than the truth really allows, attempting to fashion reality with his mouth. There are facts, and then there is Trump’s “alternate facts” as Trump’s former Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway once called them. Here is what sounds more likely factual than “total destruction:”
“If Iran were to further enrich that material — which would not take very long, a month, or two, or three, depending on how many centrifuges they have left available to them — that’d be enough for about 10 weapons,” Lewis said. “So, if everything goes badly, if Iran has retained as much capability as I worry they might, you could see Iran with an arsenal of something like 10 weapons inside a year.”
“To be clear, you fear that Iran still today maintains the capability to create up to 10 nuclear weapons within a year?” Abrams asked.
“I don’t fear it, I know it,” Lewis said. “It’s just a fact.”
The professor went on to explain that Iran has “at least” one enrichment facility the U.S. did not hit in Saturday’s attack, along with an underground production line to produce more centrifuges. In light of that, Lewis questioned the wisdom of the U.S. strike.
-and-
Donald Trump declared this weekend that his bunker-busting bombs 'obliterated' Iran's nuclear facilities and erased the Islamic Republic's chances of building a bomb.
But despite his triumphant bluster, Iran still likely boasts significant stockpiles of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and could well have other facilities lying in wait to reach purity levels required to fashion nuclear warheads….
Grossi said the stockpile seen by IAEA inspectors was stored in special casks small enough to fit in the trunks of about 10 cars. He also said he believed the material had been moved.
Satellite images published by US defence contractor Maxar Technologies showed 16 trucks leaving Iran's Fordow nuclear facility on June 19, three days before Operation Midnight Hammer.
Further images reveal a flurry of activity prior to the trucks' departure involving bulldozers and security convoys that were likely reinforcing and sealing Fordow's entrances and evacuating sensitive documents.
Now, no one outside of Iran knows exactly where its HEU stockpile is located, and Tehran's options are endless.
Not World War III
Of course, an escalator of idiot moves can turn any conflict into World War III, I suppose; but another story today reinforces the point I made in my initial assessment about the likelihood of Israel’s attack on Iran being the world’s entry into WWIII. My claim was that China would not turn this into a world war by getting directly involved with its military because it had bigger fish to fry that are absorbing its attention in Taiwan and the South China Sea. Seeming to confirm that, we have today’s news:
Nato sounds alarm over ‘massive’ Chinese military buildup and potential for Taiwan invasion
Nato secretary general Mark Rutte has said that China’s “massive” military buildup has raised the risk of conflict over Taiwan, potentially drawing in Russia and impacting European security.
Mr Rutte said Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand were closely aligned with Nato now because they were deeply concerned about China’s military buildup and the threat it poses.
Of course, who knows how much of that is the usual warmongering attempts by NATO managers to harvest much greater yields of national treasure into their defense coffers?
Speaking at a pre-summit press conference, Mr Rutte said Nato was working to grow more capable and that its leaders were set to take big steps to strengthen the alliance’s power. He described this as making Nato “stronger, fairer, and more lethal”.
So, is Trump going to bolster NATO’s efforts to bolster itself, thereby beefing up the world for the real World War III “war to end all wars?” He did, in his Big Beautiful Bomb (excuse, me, “Big Beautiful Bill,” which appears close to bombing in the senate today) pave the way for the biggest increase in US military spending EVER! (See “Big Beautiful BULL!” where “even Trump boasts that his ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ surpasses the scale of anything in history. In fact, if this Bill were a man, he’d have to be transported on doubled pallet boards, across which his exposed fat would sprawl in bruised ponds of blubber like Jabba the Hutt.” )
A central part of the proposed transformation, he said, was a major increase in military spending, with member states aiming to raise the benchmark to 5 per cent of their GDP, more than doubling the longstanding 2 per cent target.
Now, that’s the material we need for WWIII—something to amp up the MIC.
It would also involve “a concerted effort to ramp up defence industry across the alliance, bringing not only greater security but also more jobs. And a continued focus on support for Ukraine, alongside the pursuit of a just and lasting end to Russia’s war of aggression”, he said. “All of this is essential to keeping our 1 billion citizens safe.”
And that is EXACTLY what the president of the US was scurrying off to in the video above—to go speak at this NATO summit designed to strengthen NATO funding. We know he’s already proposed the Big Beautiful MIC Bill to spend the US dry in building up for the Big One; but back to the little one that is NOT WWIII (unless dumbheads prevail in blowing up the fragile ceasefire:
The Iranian Supreme National Security Council announced on Tuesday that the Islamic Republic had achieved a significant strategic victory, asserting that it had “forced the enemies to seek a ceasefire.”
O.K.
Each side puts their own face on the truth.
‘We are, at best, in a pause, shaped by calculation, not capitulation,’ he said.
‘To view Iran’s recent actions as a final move or a sign of weakness fundamentally misunderstands how this regime operates. Iran’s leadership sees its survival and regional influence as existential, and it has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to absorb losses, act through proxies, and play the long game.
‘The quiet that follows an exchange of missiles should not be mistaken for peace. It is often the eye of the storm.’ (Guney Yildiz, visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute, speaking to Metro)
MEGA MAGA Meltdown
Meanwhile, MAGA has fallen into its own nuclear reactive meltdown over Trump’s direct military involvement in attacking Iran:
This week, the MAGA camp has fractured with key figures including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and Candace Owen speaking out as the president threatens potential military action against Iran.
Nearly all of Trump’s big-name supporters started spewing extreme expletives at each other, with Laura Loomer, particularly becoming unhinged against most of the conservative voices she has ever met:
Loomer has filled her X account with venom aimed at the conservative figures she believes have betrayed Donald Trump over his Middle East backflip….
Loomer also took another broad swipe at her fellow right-wing voices, posting, “I wish I didn’t have the displeasure of having to meet most of the people I have met in conservative media over the last 10 years.”
She added that they were “literally the worst people you’ll ever meet in your life.”
The activist had not finished, adding, “I genuinely cannot stand most of the people I have had to interact with in this right wing media ecosystem the last 10 years. I can’t stand them. And I do not care about them….”
Loomer also attacked fellow conservative commentator Candace Owens….
She said, “You got married at a Trump property and utilized the Trump family to build your brand and then you married into extreme wealth and now you spend your days attacking President Trump and blaming everything on Israel. It’s intellectually lazy.”
Even Trump’s Proud Boys are somewhat backing away from Trump now that he got the US directly involved in yet another foreign war on Israel’s behalf: (Of course, they should have easily noticed all along that Trump is extremely pro-Israel, which they definitively are not.)
Everyone seems to be pissed off with Donny right now. Lawmakers from both parties are demanding accountability. Even his staunchest supporters — the ones who helped him undermine American democratic principles — are distancing themselves. After the bombing, when the President posted a celebratory message on Truth Social, the response in the Proud Boys' public Telegram channel was notably hostile:
If the United States gets directly involved in the Israel-Iran conflict, the voters that voted for Trump because there was a hope that Trump was America First can no longer support Trump. America First does not mean war for Israel. Donald Trump, focus on the health of our nation, period. We are crumbling. We are crippled with debt with no plan for a solution. Be the President you ran as.
Trump has certainly lit his own team on fire. He suddenly needs to declare a ceasefire among his own fanatical supporters before they all blow each other up inside the MAGA cult tinderbox of fuming hatred and chaos his entrance into the Iran crisis has piled them all into. Reactions are heating up in MAGAland where the Trump center is not quite holding in the way his heavily armed supporters say he is supposed to hold from the perspective of each one’s fractured sliver of the “no more wars” peaceful pie.
Hang in there with me: I’m a bunk buster against any side that is light on truth and heavy on bombbast.
You’ll find lots more to read about the mega MAGA meltdown where nearly all the major MAGA names are viciously attacking each other this week, as well as about the dollar’s near-record decline since Trump started his tariff wars, the US debt spiral under Big Beautiful Bull, along with some scary indicators for the US economy, full coverage of the Iran stories for the headlines above and several other articles about Iran, such as a campaign by the grandson of the formerly deposed Shaw of Iran to become the nation’s new leader, and a dash of Doomer Humor to soften this message’s sharp edge…