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The details of President Donald Trump's nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia caused alarm bells to ring out on CNN on Thursday. CNN's Erin Burnett and Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-VA) discussed a new report during a segment on "OutFront" that the Trump company has been awarded a $63 billion development opportunity in Saudi Arabia, and that award happened around the same time that the Trump administration was negotiating with the Saudis in a deal that allows the country to enrich nuclear energy for civilian purposes. The company that awarded the development agreement is also linked to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed Bin-Salman, who has also invested in Jared Kushner's $2 billion hedge fund during the first Trump administration. It also noted that Trump gets to keep 80% ownership in the development deal himself, while his family gets the remaining 20%. Burnett was taken aback by the report. "It's stunning," Burnett said about the report. "Congressman, the White House [told] Forbes there are no conflicts of interest. What do you say?"Walkinshaw did not mince words in his reaction. "Clearly, we have a president of the United States, Donald Trump, who has been bought and paid for by MBS and the Saudi royal family," Walkinshaw said. "As the American people struggle to make ends meet, Donald Trump is raking it in. And it appears, at least initially, [he's] giving them in return a much sweeter nuclear deal, quite frankly, than was on the table in the Biden administration with much weaker inspections, at least initially without a commitment to join the Abraham Accords. The Saudis must have been feeling like they were getting what they paid for."

The United States under President Donald Trump is making rookie mistakes in Iran, warned Seth Jones, former adviser to the commanding general of U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan.Specifically, he said on Thursday's edition of CNN's "OutFront," Iran is managing to damage critical U.S. hardware with drone attacks — something it doesn't appear as if U.S. forces prepared for in any meaningful way."There does appear to be some effort to repair some of what the U.S. has done," said Jones. "But I will tell you, I was in Europe last week looking at an update on the war in Ukraine," and what struck him in particular is that "the Ukrainians have been targeted by missiles and drones for four and a half years. They have their bases underground. They've got a range of both point and area defense. So, [they have] counter-drone capabilities."By contrast, he said, there is little if any of that kind of preparation by the U.S. forces campaigning against Iran."The U.S. should have been better prepared when this war started for these kinds of missiles, cruise [or] ballistic missiles and drones," said Jones, saying the situation is "entirely predictable" based on how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has played out."Having like structures that are hittable and not underground is a major lesson from the war in Ukraine that was not moved over to the Persian Gulf right now," he emphasized.Meanwhile, as Trump risks escalating the war, Iran has successfully choked off world oil markets — and is warning more is to come in the energy crisis. Analysts have said the new strikes have proven ineffective at getting Iran back to the negotiating table, and reports indicate that Trump's own intelligence officials have reached the same conclusion. - YouTube www.youtube.com

The Trump administration is using WNBA star Sophie Cunningham's statement that transgender athletes should not play in women's sports to boost their own policy agenda, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed to reporters during a press briefing that President Donald Trump was "following" the coverage around the Indiana Fever player's comments from an ESPN interview this week, according to The Post. Trump has made his stance on the issue clear and "moved swiftly last year to roll back transgender policies implemented by the Biden administration, including issuing an executive order that aimed to ban transgender athletes from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams," The Post reported.“We want to protect women and girls,” Leavitt said during the White House press conference Thursday. She added that Cunningham's remarks were "speaking the 'truth' about transgender female athletes," according to The Post."And the backlash she is receiving from Democrats and left-wing figures across the country is astonishing," Leavitt added.Cunningham's interview has drawn backlash from other WNBA players. She has stood by her statements."I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men," Cunningham told ESPN.Republican lawmakers and tennis legend Martina Navratilova have sided with Cunningham.The Department of Education shared a photo of Cunningham wearing a crown, captioned with a message declaring that common sense prevails.Common sense prevails ???? https://t.co/hJJhKZ0CcB pic.twitter.com/4WPOgHfttM— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) July 22, 2026

President Donald Trump is moving ahead with yet another plan to impose enormous tariffs around the world.According to The New York Times, the new tariffs are imposed on 60 countries deemed by the administration to allow products made with forced labor into their markets. "The tariffs will range from 10 percent to 12.5 percent and take effect at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, replacing a global 10 percent duty set to lapse at the same time."The United States, noted the report, "has prohibited the importation of goods made with slave labor for nearly a century, though it still allows prison labor under conditions that labor organizations consider coercive. In 2021, the United States passed a law banning imports from a region of China where it had found forced labor to be rampant." However, experts believe this is a pretextual argument for Trump's new tariffs.Georgetown Law School visiting scholar Peter Harrell argued this ruling “just brings home that [the U.S. Trade Representative] is using this forced labor investigation as a pretext to impose tariffs that Trump wants to impose for his own economic theories and preferences.”Among the affected entities are Canada and the European Union, which already have bans either in place or set to take effect, but which the Trump administration accuses of not properly enforcing.Trump initially tried to enact global "reciprocal tariffs" based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). A string of federal courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, struck down this policy, ruling IEEPA doesn't grant the president unilateral tariff powers.Since this defeat, Trump has been searching for other ways to enact similar taxes on imports, even as economists have warned his tariff policies are causing a slowdown of growth and worsening inflation.

President Donald Trump's controversial nuclear deal with the leadership of Saudi Arabia is now in doubt after the president threw the Middle Eastern nation a curve on Thursday morning.Trump abruptly inserted a bombshell condition into a nuclear agreement that was supposedly finalized just 24 hours earlier: Saudi Arabia must normalize relations with Israel to receive U.S. nuclear technology, The Washington Post is reporting.The move has thrown the entire agreement into chaos, according to the report. Trump announced via Truth Social that the civil nuclear deal—which would allow Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear power plants and pursue enrichment programs—is "totally subject" to Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, the initiative from his first term designed to normalize Israeli-Arab relations.“The Civil Nuclear Deal (There will be no enrichment of material!) being made between the United States Department of Energy and Saudi Arabia, which pertains only to non-military use such as the ones that Iran and UAE (and others) already have, will be approved,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “But is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”The problem is monumental: Saudi Arabia has consistently refused to join the Abraham Accords and shows no signs of capitulating now.According to the Post, "That attaches a major string to the deal. Saudi leaders were nearing a normalization agreement with Israel in 2023, just before the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 of that year. Since then, however, talks have been paused. Saudi leaders have said they would want guarantees of an eventual Palestinian state, and Saudi public opinion has soured toward Israel because of its handling of Gaza. Any nuclear deal tied to Saudi-Israel diplomatic breakthroughs has seemed remote."The nuclear technology deal itself has generated controversy in Congress. Lawmakers worry that expanding enrichment programs across multiple nations increases proliferation risks and could eventually result in more countries possessing nuclear weapons capabilities.Trump's sudden new condition transforms an already contentious agreement into a political landmine—potentially derailing both the nuclear deal and his broader Middle East diplomatic agenda.

President Donald Trump's election theft speech put his CIA director in the spotlight — and now calls are mounting for him to push back, according to a new report. Questions are being raised about Director John Ratcliffe's conduct during the initial investigation into foreign election tampering and his silence now as the president fires off "Looney Tunes" accusations, MS NOW's David Rohde reported Thursday. Ratcliffe's complicity—or silence—has become impossible to ignore, according to Rohde.As Trump's current CIA director, Ratcliffe served as Director of National Intelligence from May 2020 through January 2021, controlling what intelligence reached the president's desk and what remained hidden.The timing, Rohde argued, is damning.Trump claimed in his recent speech that U.S. intelligence agencies discovered Chinese interference in the 2020 election but deliberately concealed it from him.Yet Ratcliffe was the gatekeeper deciding what Trump saw and didn't see during that exact period, Rohde noted.Trump's declassified documents, released to support his election fraud narrative, claim U.S. intelligence learned in 2020 that China had "bought, stolen or hacked" tens of millions of Americans' voting records. According to Trump, spy agencies kept this bombshell secret.But Ratcliffe was one of the officials who decided what warranted inclusion in Trump's daily briefings, Rohde wrote. He argued if the intelligence existed as Trump claims, then Ratcliffe bore responsibility for either including or excluding it."Critics say that Ratcliffe should stand up to Trump and threaten to resign — or actually resign — as cabinet members did in his first term, including former Defense Secretary Gen. Jim Mattis, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and former CIA director Gina Haspel," Rohde wrote.Instead, Ratcliffe has maintained silence—enabling what former CIA analyst Julia Curlee describes as a "conspiracy of silence" enveloping Washington.Curlee, who recently resigned after 20 years of service, told MS NOW, "To me, it was crossing a Rubicon where the institution itself was being conscripted into the creation of a product to reinforce the president's messaging. I never thought that I would see the CIA participating in a presidential effort to delegitimize elections in the eyes of Americans."Former senior CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos acknowledged Ratcliffe's impossible position: protecting both his job and the CIA's institutional integrity while serving a president hostile to both."Ratcliffe certainly does need to play it both ways in some respects, as he's got a workforce at CIA that will not react well to sources and methods being compromised based on cherry-picked intelligence to promote Looney Tunes conspiracy theories," Polymeropoulos, an MS NOW contributor added. "But at the same time, he's gotta protect his job from the mercurial Trump. So far, he's managed to successfully dance through the raindrops on this issue."

White House insiders fear one of President Donald Trump's obsessions will make things worse for the GOP ahead of the midterm elections, Politico reported Thursday. Trump's decision to start ramping up his highly unpopular tariffs again is adding to Republican woes at a time when they need to have something to offer voters who are frustrated with the president's economy, according to Politico."Everything that you do that's not focused on affordability is not helpful," an administration official confided to Politico. "Anything that you're doing that is not on the plus side of the scale is a problem. When you announce new tariffs, it's not like, okay, well, let's see what they do. It's, 'Oh c---, those are the bad things.'"The administration's tariff threats are detonating inside the White House, according to the report. Republicans worry that new levies on Canadian goods and generic medications will inflame voters already blaming tariffs for persistent inflation as the midterm election approaches.Proposed tariffs could drive up prices on items Americans buy regularly—"alcohol, bacon, heart medication"—exactly the kind of consumer pain Republicans cannot afford heading into November when economic anxiety dominates voter concerns, insiders told Politico. Republican strategists think tariffs are electoral poison unless they're being reduced and expansion sends the wrong message to exhausted voters, Politico reported. A White House insider told Politico they are comfortable with the threat — with a caveat. "But actual revenue coming away from people's pocketbooks is not what Republicans are happy with," said the insider. "Any conversation about tariffs, unless it's reducing them, is a bad conversation for Republicans."White House officials are attempting damage control, arguing the tariffs are "surgical and narrowly targeted," with enough lead time before implementation to minimize consumer impact before voters head to the polls, according to Politico. They contend real affordability concerns center on housing and fuel costs, not sporting goods and spirits.However, Canadian Senator Peter Boehm, chair of Parliament's Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, expressed doubt that lower tariffs would reverse consumer behavior anyway. "I think we’re getting into an ugly phase, if there are concessions about getting U.S. alcohol back on the shelves," he told Politico. "There’s no guarantee that the consumer is going to go out and buy them.”Maine business leaders warn of broader consequences. Peter Woodcock, CEO of the Maine Chamber of Commerce, cautioned that tariffs on Canadian goods—paper, wood products, and other essentials—would ripple through Maine's economy regardless of administration assurances."We do not go unscathed from this," Woodcock warned. "There are hundreds of Maine companies that will be reviewing this and assessing its own impact on them today. If this escalates and starts encompassing additional products that would be particularly concerning."

PM says ‘those who try to harm the future of our youth will not be spared’ as scandal spirals into widespread angerNarendra Modi has vowed to set up “fast-track courts” to speed up the punishment of officials accused of leaking examination papers, as the Indian prime minister seeks to quell a youth-led “cockroach” protest movement that has rocked Delhi and posed one of the biggest challenges to his government.In his first public remarks on the movement, Modi posted on X: “Nothing is more important than the welfare and future of our youth … Those who try to harm the future of our youth will not be spared.” Continue reading...