Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
A senior federal judge blocked the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that bars reporters who refused to sign a pledge to only publish authorized information.
Confronted with increasing oil prices as a result of the joint US and Israeli attack on Iran, the treasury department’s office of foreign assets control is temporarily lifting sanctions on Iranian oil sales.
Donald Trump said this week that he was “shocked” by Iran’s response to being attacked by the United States and Israel. “Nobody expected it.” But one expert on Iran, who left the White House National Security Council last year after the conservative activist Laura Loomer asked Trump to fire him, publicly predicted Iran’s response in an article four days before Trump started the war.
US Southern Command announced that US forces carried out another “ lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific.
The Trump administration is considering occupying or blockading Iran’s Kharg Island to pressure Iran into reopening the strait of Hormuz, according to Axios.
Updated
Trump said 'nobody expected' Iran's response to US strikes, but a former staffer Laura Loomer wanted him to fire did
Earlier this week, Donald Trump sought to cast Iran’s response to being attacked by the US and Israel as impossible to predict.
“They hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait. Nobody expected it. We were shocked. They fought back,” the president told reporters on Monday.
Asked later if he was “surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time that that might be their retaliation?” Trump replied: “Nobody. Nobody. No, no, no. No, the greatest experts – nobody thought they were going hit – I wouldn’t say friendly countries, they were like neutral.”
However, there was at least one person who did publicly predict that possible response from Iran, four days before Trump announced the US attack.
Writing on the website of Foreign Affairs on 24 February, Nate Swanson, who severed as a director for Iran on the National Security Council from 2022 until 2025, and took part in talks with Iran led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner last year, wrote:
Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships transiting the Red Sea. The country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to selectively seize adversary ships in the Strait of Hormuz. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly. In 2019, during Trump’s last “maximum pressure” campaign, Iran directly attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, the world’s largest. That assault appeared to be designed to damage easily replaceable components, thus limiting the consequences to the global energy supply. But if Tehran instead assaulted infrastructure that it knows would take longer to repair, the results would be much more damaging. The relationships between Iran and the Gulf Arab states are stronger now than they were then, but Tehran knows that Gulf leaders carry real influence with Trump and could appeal to him to back down if they came under pressure.
Iran may be weak. But it still has ways to inflict real pain on the United States—and much more incentive to try than it did before.
In an interview with Foreign Affairs a week into the attack, Swanson, who joined the state department during the George W Bush administration, said that there essentially was no National Security Council in the Trump White House now.
The Trump administration definitely does decision-making differently. I mean… from Bush on, you had really a system set up where the National Security Council would basically coordinate amongst different agencies and then kind of bring all these different voices to the president to make decisions. And this administration is definitely different than even the first Trump administration where you still had that process…
I do think the president relies on a very small group of advisers to make decisions. These are relatively well-known. Secretary [of State] Rubio, [Special Envoy] Steve Witkoff, [White House Chief of Staff] Susie Wiles, the Vice President JD Vance. So, I mean, he relies on these people for advice. So it’s not like he’s doing this all on his own. But I think what is unique is the process is just different. You can see a scenario where maybe he’s not getting all the information he needs.
And I think second, though, is, also unique to the president himself, is he likes to be lobbied and pitched on ideas. So he’s very willing to take information from outside sources as equally valuable.
Swanson left the White House in 2025, after Laura Loomer, the far-right activist with influence over Trump, mounted a determined campaign to have him fired by Trump, for, supposedly having contributed to Barack Obama in 2012, and then taken part in the diplomatic effort that led to the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.
“President Trump’s mandate is clear: restore strength, accountability, and patriotism to our government. Nathanael Swanson, with his entrenched Democrat ties, Obama-era promotions, and involvement in the disastrous Iran deal, represents the kind of bureaucratic resistance that undermines this mission,” Loomer wrote on 27 May 2025.
“To protect America’s interests and ensure a foreign policy that puts our nation first while taking the Islamist threat of Iran seriously, President Trump must act decisively to remove Swanson from the Iran negotiation team”.
One month later, Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian enrichment facilities and claimed to have “obliterated” its nuclear program.
Eight months after that, Trump decided to launch an all-out assault on Iran during renewed talks, and the Iranians responded in exactly the way Swanson predicted.
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