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Trump warns Iran 'bad things' will happen if they fail to make a 'meaningful' deal, and appears to set 10-day deadline for US military action
Donald Trump has warned Iran that “bad things” will happen if no deal is reached and appeared to set a 10-day deadline before the US might take action.
During the first Board of Peace meeting, Trump said negotiations with Iran were going well but insisted that Tehran has to reach a “meaningful” agreement. “Otherwise, bad things happen,” he said.
Trump spoke of the airstrikes the US carried out in June on Iran’s nuclear facilities, claiming that the country’s nuclear potential had been “decimated”. “We may have to take it a step further or we may not,” he said, hinting that he could take a decision very soon.
You’ll be finding out over the next probably 10 days.
Trump’s comments follow months of massive US military buildup of aircraft carriers, warships and jets in the region – its largest since the 2003 invasion of Iraq – that has fuelled fears that a full-scale attack on Iran could be imminent.
Iranian and US negotiators met on Tuesday and Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said they had agreed on “guiding principles”. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday that the two sides remained apart on some issues.
Trump said “good talks are being had”, and a senior US official told Reuters that Iran would make a written proposal on how to address US concerns.
Trump, meanwhile, called on Tehran to join the US on the “path to peace”.
They can’t have a nuclear weapon, it’s very simple. You can’t have peace in the Middle East if they have a nuclear weapon.
Here’s an analysis on the current situation from the Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour:
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Roque Planas
Jeffrey Epstein abuse survivor Haley Robson will attend the state of the union address on Tuesday as a guest of California Democrat Ro Khanna.
Khanna and fellow congressman Thomas Massie co-wrote the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which compelled the justice department to release files from the federal investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender Donald Trump socialized with for more than 15 years.
“Haley’s courageous fight is proof that this isn’t about politics, it’s about exposing America’s two-tiered system of justice and bringing accountability to the Epstein class involved in the horrific abuse of young girls,” Khanna said in a statement. “She and her fellow survivors’ bravery was the catalyst for changing a rotten system and finally standing up for humanity and American values.”
Robson, a registered Republican, lobbied for the legislation that led to the release of the Epstein files and criticized the Trump administration for slow-walking the process and over-redacting documents.
Husband of Trump's labor secretary accused of sexually assaulting two of her staffers - report
The husband of Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has reportedly been barred from the labor department’s headquarters in Washington DC after at least two female staff members accused him of sexually assaulting them, the New York Times reports.
According to the Times, the allegations against Dr Shawn DeRemer, which led to the filing of a police report, are that he touched women inappropriately at the department’s main building, which is named for Frances Perkins, FDR’s labor secretary from 1933 to 1945, and the first woman ever to serve in the US cabinet.
One of the incidents, during working hours in December, was recorded on office security cameras, unnamed sources told the Times. The video, allegedly showing Dr DeRemer giving one of the women an extended embrace, was reviewed as part of a criminal investigation the source said.
Chavez-DeRemer, a former Congresswoman who lost her seat representing part of the Portland metro area in 2024, has attempted to demonstrate her loyalty to Trump, who was found liable for sexual abuse of the journalist E Jean Carroll by a Manhattan jury, by hanging a huge banner of his face on the Perkins building.
A biography of the secretary on the department’s website says that she “and her high school sweetheart, Dr. Shawn DeRemer founded an anesthesia management company and several medical clinics across the Pacific Northwest.”
In January, a security officer assigned to protect the labor secretary was reportedly placed on leave as officials investigate an alleged romantic relationship between them.
The department’s inspector general is reportedly investigating allegations that Chavez-DeRemer traveled to the Red Rocks Casino Resort and Spa in Las Vegas, along with a staffer with whom she was having an inappropriate relationship.
Roque Planas
Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, will deliver the Spanish-language Democratic response to President Donald Trump’s state of the union speech on Tuesday.
“Americans don’t need another speech from Donald Trump pretending everything is fine when their bills are too high, paychecks are too low, and masked and militarized federal agents are roaming our communities violating Constitutional rights on a daily basis,” Padilla said in a statement.
Padilla made national headlines last year, when federal agents handcuffed him and forced him to the floor while trying to ask a question to the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. He has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Roque Planas
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has expanded the block on a California state law that requires federal immigration agents to identify themselves.
The ruling by a three-judge panel temporarily bars California from enforcing a law that requires federal law enforcement agents to show their identification and badge numbers.
A US district judge in Los Angeles, Christina Snyder, had already blocked another measure prohibiting federal agents from hiding their faces behind masks earlier this month. Synder’s ruling argued that the state law discriminated against federal agents because it did not apply to local police officers.
ICE officers’ use of masks when carrying out contentious immigration arrests have led critics to condemned the agency as a “secret police” force.
Trump takes credit for helping defeat Jon Ossoff in 2017, fails to mention he campaigned against him in 2020
At his recently completed rally in Rome, Georgia, Donald Trump invited Mike Collins, a Georgia congressman who is running for Senate, to attack Jon Ossoff, the Democrat who currently holds the seat and has been fiercely critical of the president.
As he introduced Collins, Trump recalled that he had campaigned against Ossoff in 2017, when the Democrat lost a special election for a US House seat in Georgia to a Republican supported by the president, although Ossoff outperformed expectations in a Republican district.
Trump then said that when he heard Ossoff was running for Senate, in 2020, “I said, ‘No, he’s easy to beat; he’s a real stiff’”.
What the president failed to mention is that he also campaigned against Ossoff in the 2020 Senate election, and even mentioned him by name 10 times at a rally in Georgia in December 2020, ahead of the run-off election in which Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won seats in the Senate defeating Trump-backed Republicans, flipping control of the chamber to the Democrats the night before the January 6 riot.
At a recent campaign rally in Atlanta, Ossoff began his remarks on Trump’s impact on the country with indignation about a racist video the president had posted about Barack and Michelle Obama. “You’re seeing what I’m seeing, right? The president posting about the Obamas like a Klansman at 1 am,” Ossoff said.
“This is the cruelest and most arrogant group of people who have ever ascended to high office in the United States,” Ossoff went on to say about the Trump administration.
“We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans,” Ossoff added. “But this is a government of by and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class ruling our country.”
Trump also made no mention of the fact that, in 2022, when Mike Collins won the Republican nomination to represent Georgia’s 10th Congressional District in Congress, he trounced Vernon Jones, who had Trump’s endorsement, by 50 points.
'I've won affordability' Trump says
Donald Trump is currently giving a campaign-style speech, boasting about what he calls his economic accomplishments to workers at a steel service center in Rome, Georgia.
So far, the most eye-catching claim has been Trump’s statement, unsupported by anything like evidence, that he has triumphed over “affordability”.
“Do you notice, what word have you not heard over the last two weeks? Affordability. Because I’ve won, I’ve won affordability. I had to go out and talk about it,” the president said, in the clearest example yet of his deep-seated belief that the cost-of-living crisis so many Americans are experiencing is a partisan attack on him, rather than reality.
Trump is speaking in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, where early voting began this week in an election to replace the district’s previous representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress in January after publicly breaking with Trump over issues including his claim that her concern about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes was also “a hoax”.
The Trump banner on the justice department building has already received some criticism as a sign of the president’s overarching power over the nation’s legal arm.
Bill Kristol, a prominent conservative commentator and founder of The Weekly Standard, said on X, “Shameful—but in a way useful. No one should any longer pretend we have a “Department of Justice.” We have a Department of Trump.”
Senator Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, posted, “The Department of Justice is supposed to work for and represent you, not him.”
In other news, the Associated Press is reporting that a large banner featuring president Donald Trump’s face is seen on the exterior of justice department headquarters in Washington DC.
From the Associated Press:
While Trump banners have been hung outside other agencies across Washington, the decision to place one on the storied justice department building Thursday amounts to a striking symbol of the erosion of the department’s tradition of independence from White House control. The banner, hung between two columns on one corner of the building, says, “Make America Safe Again,” a slogan used by the administration to tout its efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration and violent crime.
Trump says Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's arrest is 'so bad for the royal family'
Speaking to reporters en route to Rome, Georgia today, Trump weighed in on the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince.
“I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad,” Trump said. “I think it’s so bad for the royal family … To me, it’s a very sad thing.”
Trump added:
Nobody used to speak about Epstein when he was alive … but I’m the one that can talk about it because I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing, in fact, the opposite.
Here's a recap of the day so far
Donald Trump has warned Iran that “bad things” will happen if no deal is reached and appeared to set a 10-day deadline before the US might take action. During the first Board of Peace meeting, Trump said negotiations with Iran were going well but insisted that Tehran has to reach a “meaningful” agreement. “Otherwise, bad things happen,” he said.
Also at the meeting, Trump said the United States will contribute $10bn to his Board of Peace. “When you look at that compared to the cost of war, that’s two weeks of fighting, it’s a very small number. It sounds like a lot, but it’s a very small number,” Trump said. He offered no details about how the US would send this money to the board, or if he’s requested approval from Congress for the funds.
While Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest by British police today came after years of uproar over his association to Jeffrey Epstein, documents show that he had been on the radar of US law enforcement for nearly 15 years. Mountbatten-Windsor’s name came up during a 2011 FBI inquiry into Epstein, investigative documents recently disclosed by the justice department reveal. Mountbatten-Windsor has denied all allegations of misconduct related to Epstein.
Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger will deliver the Democratic response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address next week, top Democrats have announced in a statement. The Democratic rebuttal will immediately follow Trump’s address to Congress next Tuesday. Spanberger, who served three terms in Congress, became Virginia’s first female governor earlier this year, resoundingly winning an office previously held by a Republican.
Congressmen Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie plan to introduce a bipartisan war powers resolution next week, and try to force a vote on the House floor, to curb the Trump administration’s possible military action against Iran. “Trump officials say there’s a 90% chance of strikes on Iran. He can’t without Congress,” said Khanna, a California Democrat, amid the reports that the US is positioning aircraft carriers and amassing a large arsenal of fighter jets for a potential strikes.
Donald Trump announced today that the Commission of Fine Arts unanimously approved his plans for a $300m White House ballroom. The president fired the previous members of the board last year and installed several loyalists in January, which included his 26-year-old assistant.
Ally-packed commission approves Trump's plans for White House ballroom
Donald Trump announced today that the Commission of Fine Arts unanimously approved his plans for a $300m White House ballroom.
The president fired the previous members of the board last year and installed several loyalists in January, which included his 26-year-old assistant. On Thursday, six of the seven members of the commission moved to fast-track the final vote. One commissioner recused himself because he was an initial architect on the plans.
The independent agency’s purview includes reviewing designs proposed for memorials and new or renovated government buildings, and the commission is intended to be staffed by experts in art, architecture and urban design.
The ballroom plans will also need to be approved by the Capital Planning Commission – which is now run by Will Scharf, an advisor to Trump.
A federal court is weighing a lawsuit from the Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued to put a halt to the ballroom’s construction.
