Trump administration exploring $30 billion civilian nuclear deal for Iran
The Trump administration in recent days has explored possible economic incentives for Iran in return for the regime halting uranium enrichment, including releasing billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, according to three sources familiar with the discussions.
The tentative proposal would also allow Iran to receive assistance from regional countries to enable Tehran to build a civilian nuclear program, granting Tehran access to as much as $30 billion.
The proposal is one of many ideas under consideration by the administration, the sources said. The details of the administration's discussions were first reported by CNN.
The potential deal would mark a major reversal in policy for President Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 arguing in part that the sanctions relief and unfreezing of Iranian assets had provided a ' lifeline of cash ' to the Iranian regime to continue its malign activities.
Still, it is not immediately clear if the financial proposal or any negotiations between the U.S. and Iran will move forward.
Earlier Friday, President Trump threatened to drop any possible sanctions relief for Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared victory in the war against Israel and downplayed the significance of U.S. attacks on their nuclear sites.
'Why would the so-called 'Supreme Leader,' Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of the war torn Country of Iran, say so blatantly and foolishly that he won the War with Israel, when he knows his statement is a lie?' Trump wrote in a lengthy post on Truth Social, adding. 'During the last few days, I was working on the possible removal of sanctions, and other things, which would have given a much better chance to Iran at a full, fast, and complete recovery — The sanctions are BITING! But no, instead I get hit with a statement of anger, hatred, and disgust.'
In a pre-recorded speech on Iranian state TV on Thursday, Khamenei said: 'The Islamic Republic was victorious and, in retaliation, delivered a hand slap to America's face.'
He added: 'This action can be repeated in the future.'
But later on Friday, Trump insisted the Iranians still wanted to meet with him to discuss possible sanctions relief.
'They do want to meet me, and we'll do that quickly. We're going to do it quickly,' Trump told reporters during a White House meeting with the foreign ministers of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda.
'Don't you think we have sanctions on there that they can't do anything? Wouldn't you think that they want to meet me? I mean, they're not stupid people.'
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The Guardian
36 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Correspondents reveal their true colours
The correspondence on the use of green ink (Letters, 26 June) reminded me that when I was the editor of Martindale's Extra Pharmacopoeia (a long time ago) I received a lot of letters written in green ink. Invariably they were promoting ridiculous ideas. I had no idea that they might have come from an admiral or the head of an intelligence ReynoldsPenrith, Cumbria Am I alone in starting to feel a little less safe after reading that the UK and other European nations inside Nato are dancing to Trump's tune and have committed to a massive increase in arms expenditure (Trump hails 'big win' as Nato states agree to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP, 25 June)?Matthew RyderSt Neots, Cambridgeshire Congratulations on the most savagely funny opinion piece I've read in a long time (Congrats to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez on the wedding – and to Venice for running them out of town, 25 June). There are some of us in the middle of America who appreciate finely honed sarcasm. Not many of us, but we do MelnykCanonsburg, Pennsylvania, US Steve Lupton asks (Letters, 26 June) if there is any sort of gift other than a free one. Well, there's always a free lunch …Geoff HolmanKnutsford, Cheshire 'Free' gift? There's always a bit of blackmail KuitKendal, Cumbria Can I widen the debate? When did we lose the definite article? On Radio 3 people play violin, piano etc. Not a definite article in WilliamsWorksop, Nottinghamshire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Trump cannot be a fascist
The global left and their many friends in the media are insisting with increasing hysteria that Donald Trump is imposing fascism on America. Their apocalyptical narrative is as simple as it is false: President Trump has begun the transformation of the USA into a fascist state. But the feverish intensity with which this tall story is told cannot conceal its mendacity. Trump has not, as fascists do, created blackshirt hit squads to terrorise and torture opponents, nor courts to jail them without just cause. And no rational observer believes his aim is to replace political parties with a one-party cult, or democracy with dictatorship. But above all, perhaps, the story is false because, regardless of what you were taught, and are told, fascism is a far-left, not far-right, phenomenon. Whatever else he may be, the Donald is not left-wing, unless you count his mission to protect the American working class from the negative aspects of globalisation. But for the left and their intellectual minders in command of the citadels of our culture, only their truth counts. Yet the 'proof' they offer of Trump's alleged fascism is risible. It includes his highly popular crackdown on illegal immigrants and his recent deployment of troops in Los Angeles after days of often riotous demos against that crackdown. It even includes his decision to hold a military parade in Washington DC on 14th June to mark the US army's 250th anniversary, and his 79th birthday. This, apparently, was a provocative display of – to use a new left-wing buzz-word – his 'militarisation' of America. To ram home the point, there were anti-Trump demos across America 'in defence of democracy' to coincide with the parade. As one protester explained to CBS: 'We need to show there are more Americans fighting this fascism than supporting it.' Progressive intellectuals, meanwhile, queue up to leap on board the Trump's-a-fascist bandwagon. They include the left-wing playwright, Sir David Hare, who in his Spectator diary earlier this month produced a list of the '16 principal characteristics of fascism', so vague as to be meaningless. And he used the word 'fascism' to lump together Italian fascism and its hybrid German offspring, Nazism, despite one glaring difference between the two: for many years, there was nothing anti-Semitic about Italian fascism until its inventor Benito Mussolini's fatal military alliance with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. Between 1922 when Mussolini came to power and 1938 when he introduced anti-Semitic laws, fascism did not persecute Italy's 50,000 Jews. Many Italian Jews were fascists, as was Mussolini's main mistress for most of that period, Margherita Sarfatti. Even afterwards, fascist anti-Semitism, however shameful, was only ever half-hearted. Relatively very few Jews (8,000) were deported from fascist Italy to the Nazi death camps. Indeed, in Italian-occupied south east France, fascist officers and officials saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy France. So it is not true, as Sir David claims, that if the Nazi genocide can be denied by apologists then 'fascism could be rehabilitated'. For a simple reason: whereas Nazism was intrinsically anti-Semitic, and only the demented can deny its responsibility for the Holocaust, fascism was not necessarily. But this does not rehabilitate it as it was reprehensible. for all sorts of other reasons. As for Trump, he is not anti-Semitic at all, unlike so many of his left-wing opponents. As for Trump, he is not anti-Semitic at all, unlike so many of his left-wing opponents Sir David's 16 characteristics of fascism which include 'attacks' and 'assaults' on the media, cultural institutions, higher education and universities, could just as easily be applied to any dictatorship left or right. They also include 'obsession' with higher birth rates and 'elevation' of the heterosexual family, but these are just as characteristic of Catholicism and communism as they are of fascism. Number 11, 'extreme nationalism', might seem to the untrained eye to be a characteristic of fascism but as George Orwell, a left-wing patriot who despised communists, especially middle-class English ones, pointed out in his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism, Soviet Russia was as nationalist as any fascist regime. As for number 15, 'persecution of particular racial groups': which dictatorship isn't guilty of that? Yet during the often violent recent LA protests, California's Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom called Trump 'a dictator' on X, and announced ominously in a state television address: 'Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.' Yet most Americans appear to support both Trump's sealing of the southern border which has virtually stopped illegal immigrant arrivals and his tough deportation programme. More than half (54 per cent) of Americans approve the deportations, according to a CBS/YouGov poll this month. And nearly all (97 per cent), in a poll by Pew Research Centre in March, support the deportation of illegal immigrants who have also committed violent crimes, and 44 per cent even support the deportation of illegal immigrants who arrived during the four years of the Joe Biden Presidency – believed to total a staggering 10 million people. That a clear majority vote for a political leader, as they did for Trump, and then approve what he is doing, does not entirely absolve him – or them – of being a fascist. But a determination to defend the borders of one's country surely must. To do so is not an act of fascism, as the left wants us to believe, but instead both the common sensical and the patriotic thing to do. Patriotism is the antithesis of fascism, unlike nationalism. Whereas a patriot wants to defend his country, culture and way of life, a nationalist wants to impose them. But unfortunately for the left, not even nationalism is the exclusive property of the right. It is ridiculous, as the global left keeps on doing, thanks to its ignorance and dishonesty, to try and brainwash us into thinking that the founder of MAGA, Donald Trump, is a reincarnation – in a red baseball cap, instead of a black fez – of the inventor of fascism, Benito Mussolini. Fascism was one side of the left-wing revolutionary coin; communism the other. The cult of woke which – unelected – has taken command of the vital organs of our society and culture is much more reminiscent of fascism than democratically elected Trump who epitomises the spirit of free enterprise. A quick look at Italian fascism and what it actually was, shows just how ridiculous it is to call Trump a fascist. Mussolini, the rising star of revolutionary socialism in Italy and editor of its party newspaper Avanti!, founded the fascist movement in 1919 as a left-wing revolutionary alternative to socialism. The first world war had forced him to accept that people are more loyal to country than class. He thus replaced the sacred Marxist creed of international socialism with national socialism which he called fascism. While the fascists did not abolish private property, they did set up the Corporate State – the so-called Third Way – by which the State jointly managed each major sector of the economy. The fascist class war was not between rich and poor but parasites and producers. The fascist state dominates the life of the individual both at work and outside Mussolini desired a totalitarian dictatorship with everything inside the state – nothing outside – not even the minds of the masses. To make this work, fascism had to become a religious cult complete with a nationwide congregation of the faithful, and led by the Duce, who would be, if not its Messiah, at least its Pope. Faith was Mussolini's watchword, and his bible was La Psychologie des Foules by Gustave Le Bon rather than Marx's Communist Manifesto. The 20th century would be the era of the crowd, wrote Le Bon, the sub-conscious crowd, irrational and tyrannical but impotent, unless led by a charismatic dictator in whom it had faith. The 1932 Dottrina del Fascismo, the nearest thing to a fascist manifesto, says: 'The fascist conception of life is a religious one' that aims to create 'a spiritual society'. Fascism 'accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the state.' The state is 'all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist… Thus understood, fascism, is totalitarian.' In each town, the fascists built the party headquarters in the main piazza, complete with a belltower to summon the faithful, often opposite a real church – and always uneasily. Despite making temporal peace with the Vatican in 1929, fascism remained a rival of the Catholic Church in the battle for control of the minds, if not the souls, of Italians. But the Duce was not Jesus, nor even Pope. All this made fascism completely different from the Anglo-American, conservative 'bourgeois' right of which Trump is a part. As did its credo that the state is the solution, not the problem, whereas for conservatives the opposite is the case. The fascist state dominates the life of the individual both at work and outside. In the end, Mussolini helped cause catastrophic damage to Italy and Europe. But throughout the 1920s, and much of the 1930s, fascism was hugely admired across the political divide, even by legendary left-wing icons such as Mahatma Gandhi and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the communist left and their fellow travellers in the West became desperate to distance themselves from their fascist sibling, especially after the devastation of the second world war, above all caused by the Nazi version of fascism. Their relentless propaganda successfully branded fascism as the paid creature and agent of capitalism – and thus 'far right'. In reality, it never was. To the bitter end, Mussolini remained a socialist at heart. He even called the puppet regime the Germans allowed him to run in the north of Italy from 1943-45 the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. In April 1945, when communist partisans executed him and his mistress Clara Petacci after their capture at Lake Como, those with him included his old friend Nicola Bombacci, a founder of the Italian communist party and once a member of the Soviet Comintern, who had become his closest adviser. Bombacci's last words before a firing squad shot him dead by the lake were: 'Viva Mussolini! Viva il socialismo!' I'd love to ask Trump's accusers: 'Given the facts, how can you sit there and tell us the Donald is the Duce, let alone the Führer? Surely you on left are a far closer fit, aren't you?'
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Gavin Newsom leads a new Democratic plot to make Trump seem 'not all there' like Biden
He's stumbled up the stairs of Air Force One, confused names of high-profile leaders and issued his fair share of cringeworthy gaffes - and his name isn't Joe Biden. President Donald Trump turned 79 earlier this month, which served as a reminder that by the time he leaves office, he'll break the 82-year-old Biden's record of being the oldest president in U.S. history. Yet even as he continues to dominate the political landscape, Trump's ubiquitousness has begun to expose him to more 'senior moments': tripping up the stairs - something he mocked Biden for doing - confusing the United Kingdom and the European Union alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the G7, and possibly forgetting the details of conversations he's had. That's where Gavin Newsom saw his opening to turn the aging tables against the Republicans, a tactic that other Democrats have taken note of and attempted to amplify. Newsom first teed up the line that Trump's 'not all there' during their recent row over anti-ICE protests in downtown Los Angeles, when he said the president mischaracterized details of their June 6 phone call. The governor is so adamant his side of the story is true that on Friday he sued Fox News Channel in a $787 million defamation suit asking for $787 million, arguing the right-wing network misleadingly edited a video to back Trump's timeline. The fracas started during the June 12 episode of The Daily podcast, when Newsom complained that Trump 'starts making up all these things he claimed he told me about.' 'Which, I mean, honestly, starts to disturb me on a different level, that maybe he actually believed he said those things and he's not all there,' Newsom said. 'It would send shivers up your spine' The New York Times' Michael Barbaro, the host of the podcast repeated back, 'He's not all there?' 'I don't know,' Newsom continued, adding that Trump 'claimed he had another conversation with me' once the president decided to deploy U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, a conversation the governor said never happened. At a June 12 press conference, Newsom, again, articulated that the last time he spoke to Trump was Friday night. 'He had a mysterious conversation with me three days later,' Newsom said. 'You can't even make this stuff up,' he scoffed. The governor was then asked if he had a readout of his June 6 conversation with the president. 'Oh I would love to share the readout, but I revere the office of presidency, so I'll keep it in confidence,' Newsom said. 'He has quite literally made up components of that conversation, he has been a stone-cold liar about what he said we talked about. He never discussed the National Guard. Period full-stop,' the California governor continued. 'I would love to share with you what he actually talked about. It would send shivers up your spine,' Newsom added. Of windmills and whales The Democrats' No. 2 in the Senate, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, also took a crack at Trump's age last week during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that was dedicated to focusing on Biden's cognitive decline. 'Now, I'd like you to see a short video that includes some other examples of cognitive ability,' Durbin told attendees. Durbin then rolled clips of some of Trump's greatest hits. There was the GOP nominee claiming Haitian immigrants were ' eating the dogs' during his debate with Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. There was a trademark Trump rant about windmills: 'The windmills are driving the whales crazy obviously.' Later in the hearing, Durbin pointed to a fresher example, when Trump confused the U.K. and the E.U. standing alongside Starmer last week. Trump did so as pages of the newly-signed trade deal with the U.K. were falling out of his folder, with the president quickly making a crack about the wind and Starmer leaning down to fetch them. The president then answered some questions - and did so again, later in the day. Why Newsom's hit likely won't land That, argued former first lady Jill Biden's ex-press secretary Michael LaRosa, is why Democrats' attacks on Trump's fitness will fall flat. 'President Trump doesn't miss the opportunity to engage the media and through the press, communicate directly and often with the country. Trump drives the public's perception about his age and health because he confronts any perceived weakness,' LaRosa told the Daily Mail. Once LaRosa left the East Wing, he was critical that Biden's aides kept the aging Democratic president hidden away. 'Much to my disappointment, President Biden and his team did not do anything to dispel the public's poor impression of his challenges or vulnerabilities as it related to his age and condition,' LaRosa recalled. 'President Biden and his team decided to avoid media interviews, network town halls, frequent press avails, and any environment that was organic and unscripted.' That led to Biden's debate performance - which happened a year ago Friday - being what ended his presidential campaign. 'Ultimately, Biden's under communication was his kryptonite and Trump's overcommunication is his superpower,' LaRosa noted. Republican strategist Doug Heye was also skeptical that Democrats could get age-related attacks on Trump to land. 'Even if Democrats are right - and Trump being a ball of energy, even at 79, makes that a weak hand to play - it only highlights how Democrats never said anything about Biden's age and even stood behind him after a debate performance that, to anyone with two eyes and intellectual honesty - was not just a one-off disaster,' Heye told the Daily Mail. Asked if the messenger matters - and if Newsom could land a better age-related attack on Trump because he wasn't part of the Biden administration, Heye was still dubious. 'Unless Newsom didn't have a TV, he saw what we all saw,' Heye said.
