Tuesday Afternoon News Updates: Iran Calls Out Trump's Lies — 6/23/26
Hi all, Ben here. It’s Tuesday.
Here’s what we’re tracking today. It’s a lot, so buckle up:
Iran publicly contradicting Trump on nuclear inspections, sanctions money, and the terms of the MOU
Trump’s “19 million barrels” claim is actually below average, and gas prices are spiking anyway
Even the New York Post is mocking him now
Pakistan’s prime minister praising Iran’s “ballistic missiles” stance and Khamenei in the same breath
The Pentagon is demanding another $80 billion because the Iran war is nowhere close to done
That F-15 pilot’s account of “jellyfish” drone swarms over Isfahan has people at Defense rattled
Marco Rubio dusting off the old Cuba playbook
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un says he’s expanding his nuclear arsenal, blaming the US and South Korea
A brand new poll shows Trump underwater by 37 points nationally, and North Carolina numbers that should terrify the GOP
A wild story out of Australia about how much Trump is helping China’s polling numbers, just by existing
A federal judge in Minnesota just quashed subpoenas tied to Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown
Another federal judge blocked Trump’s sketchy new voter roll purge database nationwide
The 7th Circuit just told the DOJ to slow down on Wisconsin’s voter rolls
The DC Circuit is reviving contempt proceedings against the administration in the Boasberg case
New Epstein files lawsuit timed right before Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing, plus a 69-page bar complaint against Blanche himself
A bizarre STAT News report raising real questions about whether Trump secretly got an experimental obesity drug
Trump’s $1.776 billion “slush fund” lawsuit is moving forward because DOJ still wouldn’t even put its own claims in writing
Protests in Albania are spiraling into a full political crisis over a Kushner-Ivanka development deal
The National Park Service will apparently void your parks pass if you put a sticker over Trump’s face on it
And a viral hoax about the FBI raiding an “Antifa chemical weapons lab” got picked up and spread by MAGA influencers like it was real
And Trump, somehow, still lying about the Reflecting Pool
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Let’s get into it.
Iran Has Trump Boxed In, and Everyone Can See It
Donald Trump is scrambling following the latest development in the war with Iran. He signed a memorandum of understanding that he clearly didn’t read closely, and now Iran is boxing him in with his own paperwork. Iran’s message is basically: stop misrepresenting (lying about) the terms of this MOU, or you’re going to manufacture a breach, and then we shut down the Strait of Hormuz ourselves.
Let’s be clear about a few things. Iran has not agreed to let IAEA inspectors into its nuclear facilities. Iran has not agreed to buy American soybeans or corn or anything else with the unfrozen funds, somewhere close to $12 billion. And Iran has zero restrictions on what it does with the oil it’s now shipping out, since the sanctions on its tankers got lifted too.
So while Trump is out there trying to spin this as a win, Iran is quietly making billions of dollars a day. That’s the actual data.
And here’s where it gets good, because I want you to see exactly what Trump posted this morning before I tell you what’s actually happening in the rest of the world.
