President signs memorandum at Palace of Versailles where Germans were humiliated after losing first world war. Key US politics stories from Wednesday 17 June at a glanceThe Trump administration declared a “major win” but likewise the Hezbollah chief, Naim Qassem, proclaimed a “great victory” as the text of the 14-point US-Iran memorandum of understanding became public.Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said: “The agreement is a record of US failure. People will see it and judge.” Irna, Iran’s official state news agency, released a photograph of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, holding up a Persian-language document apparently showing his signature alongside that of Trump. According to Reuters, Ghalibaf told state TV: “Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation; it was not even comparable.” Continue reading...
Fox News host Mark Levin criticized President Donald Trump's Memorandum of Understanding with Iran across a series of posts on X, with his sharpest break coming over the deal's soft treatment of Hezbollah."On top of this, we do the unthinkable," wrote Levin, a longtime Trump defender who has broken with the president over the agreement. "We capitulate to Iran's demand to protect Hezbollah."The conservative host argued that the Iran-backed group, which he said has "brutally murdered hundreds of our fellow citizens," would emerge from the ceasefire untouched. Under the terms Levin described, Hezbollah "not only survives but is immunized" and remains "free to continue to kill Americans, Israelis, and others."Levin took aim at the deal point by point. He characterized a reported $300 billion development fund for Iran, a provision that has drawn alarm from analysts, as a "shiny object," and said the sanctions waivers meant "the Iranian regime is back in business." At one point, Levin wrote, "I just keep shaking my head," calling parts of the deal "too absurd to comprehend."He also faulted how the administration handled the document's release, writing that the "roll out was unhelpful" and questioning why the text was not made public when it was signed.Levin closed with a warning, writing that "this MOU requires serious changes if not outright abandonment." Without them, he said, "a forever war — a continuation of Iran's war on the West — is not in doubt."The posts come amid broader pushback from conservatives over the deal. Trump announced the agreement to end the war with Iran over the weekend, extending a ceasefire that includes Lebanon for 60 days. The deal is expected to be formally signed on Friday in Geneva.
The memorandum of understanding President Donald Trump brokered to negotiate an end to the Iran war is already being harshly panned by many on the right — and some are beginning to set up Vice President JD Vance to take the fall.This pivot was demonstrated clearly on Fox News Wednesday, as GOP personality Ben Shapiro unloaded on the vice president."This MOU appears to be a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual goals set by the administration at the beginning," he said. "The Vice President, the chief negotiator on this project, has not well served the president."Shapiro's reaction got noticed by many observers on social media — many of whom noted that Vance wasn't even responsible for negotiating the deal, and he opposed the war with Iran from the beginning, but that none of that seems to matter in MAGA world."There it is," said Missouri Democratic congressional candidate Fred Wellman. "Vance didn't negotiate this, but he is the designated bus target because it was actually Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff who Trump will never turn on. This is the setup they always wanted. I love this for Vance because he thought he would be the one who survives.""Stab-in-the-back 2026: The process begins on the right of blaming @VP, not Trump nor the original Trump/Netanyahu conviction that war could break Iran to their demands, for the failure of the war to achieve what Trump allies promised it would (actually had promised for years)," said Bloomberg Opinion writer Ronald Brownstein.Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) had a blunt message: "Shame on you @benshapiro. This isn’t on Vance. This humiliating foreign policy debacle/disaster is on Trump. This is Trump’s [expletive] up, and only Trump’s [expletive] up. Have the guts to say that."
Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh is holding a news conference on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. to announce his interest rate decision. Wall Street investors, economists, and likely the White House will watch closely as the new Fed chair holds his first news conference following his May 22 confirmation. REPUBLICANS BUILD MIDTERM CONVENTION AROUND TRUMP TO BOLSTER […]
On Wednesday at a press conference during the G7 summit in France, President Donald Trump’s hypocrisy was laid bare when Fox News reporter Peter Doocy quoted Trump's own previous statement regarding Iran, resulting in an embarrassing exchange. “A wise man once said in January of 2020,” said Doocy, “Iran never won a war but never lost a negotiation.”“Who said that?” asked the president.“Donald Trump,” Doocy revealed. “That's what I thought you were going to say,” said Trump. Doocy continued: “So how do you go back to the United States and convince a skeptical American public that this deal is a win here?”From there, Trump launched into a solid two-minute-long rant that briefly touched on Iran before abruptly shifting to his war with the media.“They lost militarily? Okay,” he began before stammering through a muddled assertion that, even if Iran said, “‘Praise be to Allah, Donald Trump is the greatest president ever. We totally concede. We totally give up. This war is over. We have failed,’ the New York Times and CNN — and a couple of others are not all that dishonest — they'd say Iran had a great victory. Okay? They practically do that.”From there Trump diverged from discussion of Iran to focus on attacking the press, saying, “We need a fair press. That's why they're all doing so badly, because they lost credibility. When I win in a landslide and I had 93 percent bad press — they take good stories about me and make them bad. The media has so little credibility that the people voted for me.”Before turning Trump’s words back at him, Doocy had begun their exchange with questions about the $300 billion payment that is rumored to be part of the peace deal.“Only if they're doing things right,” Trump had responded, repeating the phrase three more times. The president went on to justify the fund by pointing out how much destruction the U.S. had caused in Iran, before shifting tone and saying, “So, uh, they have to behave themselves. If they're not behaving, they get hit again. You know, they'll be hit again because we can do it very easily.”He went on to say how much he appreciates that Russian President Vladimir Putin has remained “totally neutral” in the war, even though his own officials have previously asserted that Russia helped Iran target U.S. forces.Doocy then asked about reports that the U.S. would allow Iran to access its frozen assets. “Well, the unfreezing, it's an easy one to answer,” explained Trump. “We have taken a lot of their money… It's not our money. It's their money. And we froze it at a certain point in time. I guess we're going to have to give it back.”While on the campaign trail in 2015, he frequently claimed that former President Obama had “sent Boeing 757s over there, loaded with cash” to bribe Iran into joining the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the “nuclear deal” Trump ended upon entering office. In fact, the Obama administration had allowed Iran to retrieve $1.7 billion in unfrozen assets. The Trump deal provides Iran nearly 200 times that amount.
Fox News didn't just cheer on President Donald Trump's war with Iran. It helped goad him into it, according to a blistering column from political analyst Sabrina Haake.Writing in her latest Substack, The Haake Take, the longtime federal trial attorney argues that the network and its hawkish hosts pushed Trump toward military force in Iran through what critics call a "doom loop," a self-reinforcing cycle in which the White House and the network feed each other's appetite for conflict and spectacle.Haake traces the pressure campaign back to June 2025, when she says Fox personalities openly agitated for war. She points to radio host Mark Levin, who she writes "reportedly" helped push that summer's U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities by convincing Trump over lunch that Tehran was just days from a bomb. When a fragile ceasefire took hold in April 2026, Haake writes, Fox voices like Brian Kilmeade and analyst Jack Keane demanded it be broken so Trump could "finish the job."Her column catalogs a striking list of on-air demands. According to Haake, hosts including Sean Hannity, Kilmeade and Jesse Watters floated flooding Iran with small arms to spark an uprising, while Kilmeade pushed relentless strikes to "open up the strait," "grab the uranium" and "target bad actors," which she casts as an embrace of assassination. Others, she writes, hosted retired Gen. Keith Kellogg as he called for "putting boots on the ground" and seizing Iranian territory."This was not commentary or news," Haake writes. "It was Fox television personalities directly shaping foreign policy at the highest level."What makes the dynamic dangerous, she argues, is how blurred the line between the network and the government has become. Haake notes Trump has appointed more than two dozen former Fox hosts to administration jobs, and that the network showers him with praise, with Hannity calling the Iran strikes one of "the greatest military victories" in history and others insisting Trump deserved "six Nobel Peace Prizes" and a place on Mount Rushmore.In her telling, the war Fox helped sell was a disaster. Trump's much-touted deal, she writes, includes no permanent, binding nuclear dismantlement, defers its core terms for 60 days, and would hand Iran as much as $300 billion, with its "biggest achievement" being the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a return to the prewar status quo. She cites the New York Times Editorial Board's assessment that Trump "made a terrible mistake starting this war" and that the U.S. is "emerging weaker."Haake closes by demanding accountability for the network. Noting that Fox paid nearly $1 billion to settle claims it lied about the 2020 election, she wonders bitterly what it will owe "the families of 13 soldiers who died" in a war she says served the network's ratings.
