President Donald Trump said that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, following reports of his killing in a joint military operation conducted by the United States and Israel. “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday afternoon.  “This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS,” Trump said. A senior Israeli official told Reuters earlier in the day that Khamenei’s body was found, and Iranian media reported that his son-in-law and daughter-in-law were also killed in the joint operation against Iran that began early Saturday morning. In a post-Khamenei Iran, the future of the country would be in the hands of its citizens, according to Victoria Coates, the former deputy national security advisor to President Donald Trump, who spoke with The Daily Signal on Saturday before reports of Khamenei’s death. It is “not America’s mission to go and create democracy in Iran. That’s for the people of Iran if they wish to do it, or whatever other form of government they might want,” Coates told The Daily Signal. She currently serves as vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. In a video message announcing the operation early Saturday morning, Trump told the Iranian people that their freedom was “at hand.” “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations,” Trump said. Timing Operation Epic Fury, the joint operation, targeted key regime assets, military installations, and Khamenei’s compound. Neither Coates nor Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, believe the U.S. operation will last for an extended period of time. Both spoke with The Daily Signal before reports of Khamenei’s death. “What we’ve seen so far is something much closer to Venezuela than to Iraq and Afghanistan in the past, right in terms of administration signaling,” Berman said, referring to the U.S. capture of Venezuelan totalitarian leader Nicolás Maduro in January. “The optimal scenario for the president is for the supreme leader [of Iran] to go and for a new crop of leaders that are more amenable to compromise with the United States to come about,” Berman said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that, you know, [Trump] wants to take out the entire regime, and he wants to pull it out, root and branch.” In Venezuela, members of Maduro’s regime remain in power, but have proven to be amenable to cooperating with the U.S. now that Maduro is sitting in prison in New York. Trump said in a video announcing the U.S. strikes in Iran that the operation is being conducted “for the future.” “We pray for every service member as they selflessly risk their lives to ensure that Americans and our children will never be threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran,” Trump said. US Targets The U.S. sought a diplomatic solution with Iran during three rounds of recent negotiations, but Iran refused to agree to stop enriching stockpiles of uranium. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, one of the diplomats involved in recent talks between the U.S. and Iran, told CBS News that the Iranians were willing to minimize enrichment, forgo stockpiling nuclear material, and allow IAEA inspections. “We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” Trump said in his video message Saturday, adding, “We’re going to annihilate their navy.” Coates says she believes there are “off ramps” built into Trump’s planned operation in Iran, “so if we get farther faster than we anticipated, the president can cut things off.”   Khamenei’s death could be one of the “off ramps” for U.S. deescalation in the region.   The U.S. is targeting Iran’s ships and naval capacities “because the president understands that the first natural Iranian reaction would be to do maneuvers to close or narrow the Strait of Hormuz,” Berman said. The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and is a key oil shipping lane. Global oil markets would be affected if Iran successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz, Berman explained, adding global pressure on the U.S. to halt its operation against Iran. Most of the U.S. strikes so far have focused on Iranian military targets, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a national security research organization based in D.C. The Israel Defense Forces say they have carried out strikes against Iran’s missile launchers and aerial defense systems. Iranian Response The Iranian regime responded by launching missiles at Israeli and U.S. military assets in the Middle East. Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry said Saturday it “is dealing with damage in three buildings” in the capital city of Manama and nearby Muharraq caused by “drone attacks and falling debris from an intercepted missile.” Smoke rises after Iran carried out a missile strike on the main headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Manama, Bahrain, Feb. (Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images) Iran has also targeted countries that host U.S. military bases, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait. A concern, according to Coates, is that Iran will activate terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. “We don’t know what crossed over our southern border or any of our other borders during the Biden administration, and we but we do know there were a number of folks on the terrorist watch list who got in,” Coates said. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Saturday that she is in “direct coordination with our federal intelligence and law enforcement partners as we continue to closely monitor and thwart any potential threats to the homeland.” Middle East ‘Anti-Iran’ Sentiment The United Arab Emirates “condemned and denounced” the Iranian missile attacks in a statement Saturday, calling the targeting of “the UAE and several brotherly nations in the region” a “flagrant violation of national sovereignty and a clear breach of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.” There is now an “anti-Iran regime” coalition forming in the Middle East, according to Berman. “The Iranians have done themselves no favors, because they’ve hardened Arab attitudes about the need for regime change in Iran,” he said. It is possible, according to Jacob Olidort, chief research officer and director of American security at the America First Policy Institute, that nations such as Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia will also take action against Iran, especially if their civilians are killed as Iran targets U.S. military infrastructure in the region. The operation’s “consequences,” Olidort says, “will be global in scale, and they will dramatically transform the global landscape.” Olidort explains the operation against Iran provides “a great deal more opportunities for the United States and its partners to expand opportunities for peace and prosperity.” The post BREAKING: Trump Says Khamenei Is Dead. What Happens Now in Iran?  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Two Jews, three opinions. That sounds like a bad Mel Brooks joke, but it is exactly what the bipartisan Commission on Civil Rights testimony on campus antisemitism sounded like this month. The Jewish world appears genuinely divided on whether the federal government should take real, muscular action to protect Jewish students. I find that strange, bordering on surreal. The United States has been the greatest protector of the Jewish people in all recorded history. America welcomed refugees after pogroms and the Holocaust, stood with Israel when much of the world wouldn’t, and built the freest, safest diaspora community Jews have ever known. Yet a vocal segment of the community is seized by the fear that if President Donald Trump does anything in the name of stopping antisemitism (defunding universities that tolerate harassment, enforcing Title VI the way we enforce it for every other protected class), that will produce more antisemites. I’m sympathetic to Jewish nail-biting. I also have “chai” anxiety about politicos turning Jews into partisan footballs. But here, that fear is dangerously misplaced. The “not in our name” movement rests on two flawed assumptions. The first is that antisemitism is something we can manage or de-escalate through our own behavior. The second is that the hatred is ultimately about something we did. Neither is true. Antisemitism is an ancient, irrational hatred. It has survived every attempt at assimilation, every political realignment, every change in Jewish behavior. Jew hatred has been dressed up as religious duty, economic resentment, racial pseudoscience, and now as anti-Zionism. At bottom it is about who we are. We are a people who introduced monotheism to a pagan world, who gave the West its moral grammar, and who somehow produced outsized contributions in every field despite millennia of exile and massacre. Jew hatred isn’t a rational response to Israeli policy or campus activism or Jewish privilege. It’s a nasty virus that mutates but never dies. Jew hatred won’t disappear no matter what we do or who is in the White House. But university administrators who turned blind eyes toward anti-Jewish crimes respond to enforcement and career-ending consequences. Pretending Jews can stop antisemitism by rejecting help from the wrong president is pure mishegas. Think of the guy in the classic Jewish flood parable who waves off every rescuer, yelling, “Hashem will save me!” only to drown, wondering why no miracle showed up. (In Heaven, G-d shrugs, “I sent you three boats!”) The data from the antisemitism hearing in Congress itself proved the point. The surge in incidents didn’t begin with Trump’s second term. It exploded after Oct. 7, 2023, under the previous administration, while many universities and federal offices dithered, or worse. The students who testified are sincere and brave for speaking up. Their concern that aggressive federal action will politicize Jewish suffering and turn it into a pretext for other agendas is understandable. But I’m twice their age and that’s old enough to know, as the kids say, haters gonna hate. Worse, when even basic enforcement of existing civil-rights law is framed as a partisan assault, the antisemites win twice: once by attacking Jews, and again by making Jews afraid to accept defense. So where do we go from here? Stop treating protection as a partisan luxury. Equal enforcement of the law isn’t a favor to Jews or to Trump. It’s the bare minimum America owes every citizen. Demand civil rights for everyone, including ourselves.  The encampments are largely gone, and administrators are suddenly paying attention because universal rules are finally being applied without apology. Yes, we should watch for overreach and defend free speech. But the solution isn’t paralysis or waiting for the right president. It’s consistent, principle-driven action no matter who sits in the White House. In the end, Jews don’t get to pick and choose which forms of bigotry deserve zero tolerance. We don’t tell the fire department “not if that guy is driving the truck.” History has been brutally clear on what happens when we wave off the lifeboats. Clarity about who we are is what has always saved the Jewish people.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post 2 Jews, 3 Opinions on Campus Antisemitism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

REUTERS–The United States and Israel launched the most ambitious attack on Iran in decades on Saturday, and Israel said Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed in the operation. Khamenei’s body has been found, a senior Israeli official told Reuters. Iran called the strikes unprovoked and illegal and responded with missiles fired at Israel and at least seven other countries, including Gulf states that host U.S. bases. President Donald Trump, who made the biggest foreign-policy gamble of his presidency after campaigning for reelection as a “peace president”, said the strikes were aimed at ending the threat from a country that has threatened the U.S. for decades and ensuring Iran could not develop a nuclear weapon. Trump called on Iranian security forces to lay down their weapons and invited Iranians to topple their government once the bombing ended. In a video posted overnight on social media, he also warned there could be U.S. casualties, although several hours later the Department of Defense said it had no reports of American deaths or injuries.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested the strikes had killed Khamenei, and called on Iranians to “take to the streets and finish the job.” There were many signs indicating Khamenei “is no longer”, Netanyahu said. He said Khamenei’s compound had been destroyed, and Revolutionary Guard commanders and senior nuclear officials had been destroyed. Iranian media had said Khamenei’s son-in-law and daughter-in-law were killed in the strikes. Originally published by Reuters The post Iranian Leader Khamenei Killed in Strikes, Israel Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address hit several important policy areas, but even though there was no specific mention of the country’s declining marriage rates and “birth dearth,” the concerns of families were a major theme. One of the key concerns for families today is the future of American homeownership. The cost and supply of housing is an issue that comes up often among policymakers and academics who study the decline in family formation. The president told the story of a Houston mom of two who has put in 20 offers on homes, only to be outbid by institutional investors. Trump pointed to an executive order he signed in January banning Wall Street investment firms from buying homes that could otherwise be purchased by families. Some commentators see this move as unhelpful government intrusion in the housing market, but the average American family cares more about being able to buy a home in a safe neighborhood than strict adherence to laissez-faire economics. Another issue that concerns parents is the financial prosperity of their children. The president touted his Trump Accounts as a way to help today’s children “jumpstart the American Dream” when they become adults. Beginning on July 4, the tax-deferred investment accounts will be seeded with a $1,000 initial deposit for every American child born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028. Parents don’t have to touch the accounts after that, but as the president said, even “modest additional contributions” could help them grow to over $100,000 or more by the time they turn 18. While every parent is concerned about securing a stable financial future for their child, Trump’s acknowledgement of Sage Blair and her mother, Michele, in the gallery brought attention to another challenge facing families. Sage was 14 when she began identifying as a boy. Her school “affirmed” her decision and treated her as a boy without telling her mother. The actions of these adults set off a chain reaction that led Sage to be trafficked, abused, and separated from her mother. The president’s willingness to highlight Sage’s story brought needed attention to the growing trend of state government’s punishing parents for not affirming children who identify as the opposite sex. Some legislators have tried to fight back. Virginia lawmakers introduced HB 2432, “Sage’s Law,” in 2023, requiring schools to inform parents if their child wanted to identify as the opposite sex. The bill passed the Virginia House of Delegates, but it failed in the state Senate. The failure of elected officials to protect the vulnerable and stand up for families is an all-too-common reality in today’s political landscape. It’s one reason Democrats refused to stand when Trump asked every lawmaker who prioritizes the needs of American citizens over illegal aliens to rise to their feet. Misplaced priorities in public safety are why so many families have had to bear the brunt of violent crime—perpetrated either by repeat offenders or immigrants who are in the country illegally. One example was the killing of Iryna Zarutska on a North Carolina train in 2025. Her attacker, Decarlos Brown Jr., had a long criminal history that included 14 previous arrests. No parent should have to bury a child because our justice system fails to do its job, but too many families across the country have had to do just that. There is a lot of work being done on the political right to strengthen America’s families, much of it focused on attempts to boost declining marriage and birth rates. But the reality is that family policy encompasses more than wedding bells and baby showers. It includes young couples who want to have children but are afraid they won’t be able to afford a home in a safe neighborhood. It also extends to schools, where adults should be focused on the building blocks of a solid education, not pushing radical ideas about gender in the classroom. Trump’s State of the Union address was a good reminder that all policy is family policy. The post Trump Reminds Americans That All Policy Is Family Policy appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” with Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. This show was filmed prior to the start of Operation Epic Fury. Sami Winc: So, Victor, let’s then turn to another topic before we go to a break again. I was wondering your thoughts on Iran. I know that Trump has moved assets into the region, that the regime has now killed, from my source, 32,000 demonstrators, and Trump has said he’s going to do something. And not so much what will Trump do—because, obviously, you couldn’t know that—but what’s in the realm of possibilities of what Trump might do and what is the grand strategy of Trump right now? Victor Davis Hanson: Well, he’s looking at—he always looks at these situations of intervention or bombing on a cost-to-benefit analysis, whether it was killing al-Baghdadi, or Soleimani, or the Wagner Group, or bombing ISIS in his first term, or hitting the nuclear facilities in his second in Iran, or the Maduro kidnapping capture, etc. And so that’s a good way to look at it. What are the downsides? The downside is: If he starts bombing, who does he bomb and can he hit them? He has to have the Revolutionary Guards. He has to get the theocracy. They all know he’s going to be after ’em. They’re in bunkers. Will he be able to do it? He’s gonna have to get the missile depots. He’s gonna have to get all of the means that that regime exercises to create deterrence: missiles, nuclear facilities … tanks. Get rid of ’em all. And he should expect, as we saw with Hamas in the tunnel, that they’ll all be parked, stored—like they are in Beirut—in apartment buildings, in hospitals, in mosques. And so they want a lot of collateral damage. And then he has to understand that he needs a popular uprising at the same time. We’ve already had one and that prompted him to send the assets to the region. But he said, and you said, 32,000 people were killed and they’re probably executing thousands that we don’t even know about. So, if you’re afraid to go out on the street and you see American planes, maybe even Israeli planes, and they’re hitting targets, is your reaction, “Good, good. I’m glad they’re killing my government,” or “I don’t really care anymore. They’ve killed us. Why are they hurting Iran? I’m an Iranian”? And will that create a counter-patriotic fervor? Then he has to think: Look what happened in Libya when we bombed. We got rid of Gaddafi, the Obama—that triad of Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Samantha Power. And what did they give us? They gave us ultimate chaos. And we went in and took out Saddam, we had chaos. We went in and got rid of the Taliban, we got chaos, and we had to stay there. So do we want ground troops in there to overthrow—no, we don’t. So, who is going to take the place—the shah? And if we could get the shah’s son, we could have him say, “I will not be in power for more than three years. I’m a transitional… to get a new constitution and bring in outside observers for fair elections. And we’re gonna outlaw that theocratic Khamenei party, sort of like the Germans outlaw the Nazi party.” So that’s a lot of—and then he has the weather and then he has other considerations. Israel has a whole list of targets and they may not be the same number of targets as we are. They have killers that have killed Jews, they have terrorists. They know where they are. Once people see Israeli planes, does that confirm the propaganda of the regime that it’s Israelis, et cetera. Then he’s got the MAGA base to worry about. Tucker Carlson said just the 30-minute incursion into Iran was gonna start World War III. Steve Bannon, that group. So he has the assets. You can’t take a 100,000-ton displacement, huge carrier, $14 billion, 5,000 people, and just stick it out there forever. You know what I mean? It has a shelf life, maybe three, four months at most. So, he’s assembling these assets and they’re almost in place. They’re in the Mediterranean, they’re in the Strait of Hormuz, they’re in the Persian Gulf, they’re in the Red Sea. They can come at a 360-degree angle. But they’re reaching their climactic point of their extreme readiness. That means if you’re a young sailor, you’re not sleeping well, you’re gonna be called at any moment. You’re having drills. You’re at a state of readiness. It’s not sustainable for more than three or four weeks. So, at some point the commanders are going to come to Trump and say, “You’ve gotta pull the trigger, or we gotta go back.” And that is gonna be a decision, I think, that has political ramifications. So then his other advisors are gonna say, “We’re nine months from the midterm. If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it now. And this is what can happen if we have a bloodbath and we hit a hospital and the Europeans—don’t expect the Europeans to be there. Don’t expect the British to let us use Diego Garcia. Don’t expect anybody—and expect the Chinese and the Russians to be very angry because they’re gonna lose their asset and they will cause us problems somewhere else. Maybe they’ll start threatening, at a higher degree, Taiwan, or maybe Putin will escalate in Ukraine while we’re doing this.” So, there’s all these things that he has to filter out as important, somewhat important, irrelevant. And then he has to say, “What is the timing on the world stage?” Well, the Olympics is over. Well, you can’t bomb somebody during the Olympics. I mean, there’s this pretense— Sami Winc: All these things come in. That’s true. Victor Davis Hanson: And you can’t bomb somebody before the State of the Union. So, my anticipation is the Olympics are over, the State of the Union is over. The weather and the seasons are getting better. And if he is going to do it, he would probably do it in the next 10 days. And then he will not have ground troops because, you know, he said George W. Bush should have been impeached for going into Iraq. So, it’s a very difficult thing. Very quickly, then, there’s a grand strategy. I just wanna say, you know, H.R. McMaster and Nadia Schadlow created the first national security strategic assessment in the first term. That was updated. I think Michael Anton and others updated it. It was a little bit different, but it had the same theme. The theme was that Trump is not an interventionist. He doesn’t want to go into ground—but he is not an isolationist. He is a Jacksonian. He is a preemptive deterrent. That’s what he wants. And his main fear in the world is China. And if you think about that—and it’s been pretty brilliant what he is done the last 13 months, because if you take, say all these isolated incidents that everybody said, “Oh, he is herky-jerky. We don’t know what he is gonna do on any given day. Oh, there’s no point to it.” There is. If you just go down the list of say, nine or 10 things. Take the Panama. He goes in and he starts, “We might take the canal back. We might do this, we might…” but what was the whole point of that? The whole point was to get the Chinese out of the entry and exit and tell the Panamanians you violated the spirit and the letter of the Panama Canal Treaty and we have a right to revoke it. So you’ve got one choice, you get ’em outta here now, and you restore the Panama Canal to a partnership between us and you, or else. That worked. Take another one. He got rid of Maduro. Maduro had a communist enclave that was a drugs -exporting conduit to Mexico, or the United States via Mexico. And partnership with the left-wing government, Colombia, anti-American, and embargoed and stealthily sending oil to China. And he said, “Nope.” And we’re going to do what? We’re going to starve Venezuela out of its oil. We’re gonna blockade it, and we’re gonna take him out and we’re gonna restore the Monroe Doctrine. And China, we should have warned you in Panama. Now get out. And they did. The post Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Cost-Benefit Analysis for Striking Iran appeared first on The Daily Signal.