Trump blindsides JD Vance by forcing him to learn about major Iran update from reporters

Vice President JD Vance had no idea President Donald Trump had escalated the war in Iran until reporters tipped him off during a press conference in Hungary on Tuesday, according to reports.

A Washington Post reporter recommended Vance check his phone as he was on a stage with Trump ally Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, just after Trump had sent a serious threat warning on his Truth Social platform and said "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," if Iran does not make a deal by his 8 p.m. ET deadline, The Daily Beast reported.

The Post reporter asked Vance if he had any new information that signaled a potential deal could be likely.

"I don’t—unless I have a text message from Steve Witkoff," Vance said in response, mentioning Trump's Middle East envoy.

He reached into his pocket and grabbed his phone, then realized the situation had changed.

"I do have a message from Steve Witkoff," Vance said awkwardly after receiving the message.

But the moment became noticeably more awkward, The Beast reported. A Reuters reporter followed up and said he might want to really check his phone.

"I do think you have to read that text because we have reporting that the United States is striking some targets in Kharg Island," the Reuters reporter said. "You did say that the military objectives of this war have been achieved. So could you help us understand why the president is still threatening to attack every bridge and every power plant in Iran?"

Vance, who served in the Marines and was briefly deployed in Iraq, has previously said he was against long-term wars in the Middle East and has had to balance his previous public statements with his current role in the Trump administration.

He tried to respond to the question.

"So you asked about Kharg Island," Vance said. "You know, my understanding, you know, having talked to Pete (Hegseth) and General Caine about this, is that we were going to strike some military targets on Kharg Island, and I believe we have done so."

"(The president)... has said very clearly, that we’re not going to strike energy and infrastructure targets until the Iranians either make a proposal that we can get behind or don’t make a proposal. But he’s given them until Tuesday, at 8 o’clock, so I don’t think the news on Kharg Island represents a change in strategy."

“A whole civilization will die tonight.” Is this something Jesus would have said?

At a White House Easter event last week, Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, compared him to Jesus Christ, invoking betrayal, false accusations and even a kind of political “resurrection.” The remarks were blasphemous. So was Trump’s own doomsday threat to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age.”

Trump is openly contemplating devastation so complete it would erase the basic infrastructure of an entire nation — its power, its bridges, its ability to function. His threat would cause immeasurable suffering and death, amounting to the destruction of a civilization.

This is where we are now. We are threatening civilizational collapse as if annihilation were just another Truth Social post from the “Jesus-in-Chief.” While Trump exalts in destruction, many conservative Christians remain conspicuously silent, seeking instead to view the war as a “holy” one.

For decades, the United States has defined itself in opposition to regimes like Iran’s, governments where religion and power are fused, where clerics hold ultimate authority, where divine law justifies repression.

Since 1979, Iran has operated under a system in which the Supreme Leader is both political authority and religious figure, claiming legitimacy that flows from God as much as from the state. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has built an identity around martyrdom and sacred duty.

Fighters are taught that death in service to the Republic is not just honorable, but holy — sound familiar? A gateway to eternal reward. Dissenters are cast as enemies of God. Protest becomes heresy. Opposition becomes sin.

This is what we in the United States have long called fanaticism. It is what we have historically opposed.

And yet, as this war escalates, the language coming out of Washington is beginning to echo it.

Start with the effort to cast political leadership in explicitly religious terms. Influential figures within Trump’s orbit have compared his struggles to the suffering of Jesus Christ, not as a metaphor, but as a narrative of persecution and vindication.

I guess they forget that Trump was born in wealth, never suffered for anything, has a history of not sharing that wealth, for example the defunct Trump Foundation, and using that wealth to discriminate against Black people.

Then there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has described military operations in overtly biblical terms, turning real-world events into spiritual analogies. A downed American airman becomes “reborn,” his ordeal wrapped around Easter Sunday, his rescue framed as a miracle.

Hegseth invokes Jesus while speaking in the language of lethality, creating a dangerous fusion of faith and militarism. It’s an un-Godly version of Christianity that promotes power rather than humility — something Hegseth has none of.

Further, U.S. service members have alleged that commanders are casting the war with Iran as a divine “end-times” mission, presenting the conflict as part of a biblical prophecy and even suggesting Trump is “anointed” to carry it out.

In Hegseth’s official briefings about the war, he routinely invokes “divine help.” Calls for “overwhelming violence” are delivered in the name of Jesus Christ. Telling listeners to get down on “bended knee.”

For years, American officials pointed to this exact mindset within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as evidence of extremism, and the belief that war is divinely ordained, that enemies are theological, that death carries sacred meaning.

That used to be called radicalization. Now the United States sounds like a religious fundamentalist government.

This is no longer a conflict between a secular democracy and a religious theocracy. It is more volatile, two sides invoking God, each claiming righteousness, each convinced that heaven is on their side.

To bottom-line it, it’s Jesus versus Allah. Victory for the righteous or annihilation for the heathens.

Which brings us back to Trump’s threat and the destruction of a “whole civilization.” Not a military target or a regime palace, but a civilization.

International leaders have warned that targeting civilian infrastructure on that scale would be a war crime. But in a conflict all about religious certainty, such warnings are dismissed as atheist.

History shows religious wars do not end well, if they end. They harden and expand. They become generational. From the Crusades to modern sectarian conflicts, once God is invoked to justify violence, the conflict becomes unbounded.

And once people are convinced God is on their side, it becomes nearly impossible to stop.

If we continue down this path, fusing military action in religious language, elevating leaders into instruments of divine purpose, framing war as sacred, then the line between “us” and “them” will disappear.

On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIV continued to speak out against the war. He tore apart the dangerous attempt to frame the war in Iran as a holy crusade of "Jesus vs. Allah," reminding the world that the Divine cannot be used to justify killing an “entire civilization.”

By declaring that "no one can use Jesus to justify war," the Pope stripped the conflict of its religiosity, exposing it instead as a failure of human diplomacy.

His chilling warning that God simply "does not listen to the prayers" of those whose hands are stained with the blood of combat, serves as a firm warning about weaponization of faith.

If we continue to invoke the name of Christ to justify the destruction of our adversaries, he said, we risk not only a global "irreparable abyss" but a profound spiritual bankruptcy where our prayers fall on deaf ears.

President Donald Trump issued a stark threat Tuesday, then declaring on a Truth Social post, "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" unless Iran lifts restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. EST.

Critics globally condemned the threat as genocide.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan characterized Trump's statement as "ravings of a homicidal maniac and sociopath," while British journalist Owen Jones warned Trump appeared to threaten nuclear weapons use.

Liberal influencer Brian Krassenstein called it "literally a genocide," on a X post. Independent journalist Ethan Levins also took to X and reacted to Trump's statement, "He's about to genocide 90 million people."

Trump has been threatening Iran since March, initially threatening power plants. Throughout the past weeks he escalated his threats, targeting civilian infrastructure including water treatment and bridges — potential war and genocidal crimes according to United Nations.

Negotiations between the Trump administration and Tehran have stalled, according to reporting by WSJ.

Watch the video below.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Continuing the assault on transgender people that President Donald Trump launched as soon as he returned to power last year, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights rescinded portions of settlements intended to protect trans students at five school districts and one college.

The department framed the move as “freeing schools” from the Biden and Obama administrations’ “illegal and burdensome enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972,” a landmark civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.

According to The Associated Press, “One of the school systems, Delaware Valley School District in rural eastern Pennsylvania, received notice of the change from the Trump administration in February and has since voted to roll back its antidiscrimination protections for transgender students.”

The administration also rescinded provisions of resolution agreements with Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware and Fife School District in Washington, as well as California’s La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified, and Taft College.

“The Trump administration has opened at least 40 civil rights investigations into educational institutions that provide protections for transgender students,” and filed lawsuits in California and Minnesota, The New York Times reported. However, “Education Department officials said there was no precedent for the federal government terminating previously negotiated civil rights settlements with schools. Civil rights lawyers who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations said they were unaware of previous examples of such a move.”

Advocates for trans people sharply condemned the rollback, which came on the heels of last week’s International Transgender Day of Visibility.

“This sends a chilling alarm that trans students really are a target of this administration,” Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the California-based Transgender Law Center, told the Times. “It’s extremely concerning. Students should be safe to go to school and get an education.”

Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement that “there is absolutely no basis for what the Department of Education is doing, and it is unimaginably cruel. Title IX exists to ensure that students are protected from discrimination and treated with dignity so that they can learn and thrive in our schools. It’s always been about that. It’s what students, families, lawmakers, and advocates fought for when Title IX was passed decades ago. But the Trump administration’s Department of Education has spent its limited resources to strip Title IX of that very purpose.”

“Real complaints of discrimination and sexual assault are going unanswered by the Department of Education while conservative lawmakers continue to escalate their attacks on a small minority of students,” Patel noted. “Parents, teachers, and students need the department to focus on addressing real harms on campuses instead of rolling back policies that keep all students safe.”

“We should all be alarmed at the Trump administration’s cruel escalation of their anti-trans agenda,” she added. “When they push laws that explicitly target trans people or attempt to use scientifically inaccurate language to define sex, they are also inevitably targeting all women and girls. They want to control what we do, how we look, and how we act until we are pushed out of public life. But we are not going anywhere.”