Karoline Leavitt Sets Unhinged Timeline for Trump to Decide on Iran
The world is on edge waiting for Donald Trump to decide if he will order the U.S. military to attack Iran. And according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, everyone will have to wait a little longer—two weeks, to be exact.
Leavitt revealed Trump’s decision-making timeline during a press briefing at the White House Thursday.
“Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” Leavitt said, reading out a statement from Trump.
A reporter then pointed out that Trump often sets two-week deadlines only to move them to suit his needs, as he has done while tepidly trying to convince Russia to stop its war in Ukraine.
“How can we be sure that he’s going to stick to this one on making the decision on Iran?” asked AFP’s Danny Kemp, referring to a similar two-week deadline Trump has repeatedly given Russia to stop bombing Ukraine (with no tangible results).
Leavitt stammered as she claimed that Iran negotiations and Russia-Ukraine negotiations were completely different before pivoting to a tried-and-true fallback: blaming Joe Biden.
a reporter points out to Leavitt that Trump says something will happen in "two weeks" all the time and then it doesn't happen 🙃 pic.twitter.com/IEWCZ4mXtG
Trump has previously claimed that Iranian officials want to come to Washington and negotiate an end to Israel’s war, which has so far killed at least 639 people in Iran, according to human rights groups.
Tehran, for its part, has said that “no Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House.”
“The only thing more despicable than [Trump’s] lies is his cowardly threat to ‘take out’ Iran’s Supreme Leader,” the Iranian mission to the U.N. wrote on X Wednesday.
Either way, making a people under attack wait two weeks to see if they will face further bombardment is a bonkers decision. It also marks a significant change in tone for Trump, who has so far indicated he is open to attacking Iran and has repeatedly demanded “unconditional surrender” from the Middle Eastern nation. But maybe he’s content to sit back and let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do all the dirty work.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security have claimed multiple times since May that there’s been a 413 percent increase in assaults against their agents to justify their officers wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves. The data states otherwise.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump penned a column asserting the obvious—ICE officers are covering their faces and wearing plainclothes while they kidnap people off the street to “avoid accountability” and make it “harder to say precisely who had plucked up a college student or local mother and sent them to jail in another state.”
Bump first raised the question in May in an article that had acting ICE Director Todd Lyons so incensed that he wrote a letter to the editor claiming a staggering increase in assaults, writing “officers wear masks for personal protection and to prevent doxing.… Since President Donald Trump returned to office, ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
The use of a percentage here is very intentional, as it’s easier to inflate and sensationalize. “A 413 percent increase could mean that the number of assaults went from 200 in 2024 to 1,026 in 2025—or that it went from eight to 41.… There’s a big difference between an increase of 826 assaults and an increase of 33—especially if some of those ‘assaults’ are of the Lander variety,” wrote Bump, who dug into the claim in a piece published Thursday.
Bump found that assaults on agents had decreased every month since 2024 and, despite repeated requests to ICE, wasn’t given any proof of ICE agents being doxxed, targeted, or assaulted outside the context of an immigration arrest.
The organization that has conducted countless raids and crackdowns, kidnapped innocent people off the street, and handcuffed elected officials, is now trying to frame itself as the victim so that its officers can continue to feel big and strong behind the anonymity of their masks.
“We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value. That the organization would not provide evidence for its claims … diminishes the extent to which we should grant ICE the benefit of the doubt,” Bump wrote. “Leaving the question I posed in May: Why are these officers covering their faces if not to avoid accountability?”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants the Pentagon to tone any commemoration of Juneteenth way, way down, in keeping with his anti-diversity crusade.
Hegseth’s office requested the Department of Defense take “a passive approach to Juneteenth messaging,” according to an email obtained by © New Republic
