Trump Administration Decisions on Iran, Security Incidents, and Domestic Issues

Negotiations led by special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will shape Trump’s calculus – key US politics stories from Monday 23 February at a glance

Deal or no deal? Donald Trump’s decision to order airstrikes against Iran will hinge in part on the judgment of Trump’s special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, about whether Tehran is stalling over a deal to relinquish its capacity to produce nuclear weapons, according to people familiar with the matter.

The US president has not made a final determination on any strikes, as the administration prepares for Iran to send its latest proposal this week, in advance of what officials have described as a last-ditch round of negotiations scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.

Those talks will be led by Witkoff and Kushner, whose assessment on the likelihood of a deal will shape Trump’s calculus.

Trump on Monday denied reports that Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, has cautioned him about the risks associated with launching a military campaign against Iran.

“I am the one that makes the decision, I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don’t make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for that Country and, very sadly, its people, because they are great and wonderful, and something like this should never have happened to them,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

But there is also uncertainty inside the administration about whether airstrikes would be sufficient to strong-arm Iran into making a deal – or even bring about the ouster of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his circle of religious leaders.

Donald Trump has declared that he can use tariffs in a “much more powerful and obnoxious way”, as the UK and the EU said they were seeking urgent clarity on the US trade deals they struck last summer.

Trump threatened to ramp up his global tariff war on Monday, after a supreme court ruling last week that he had overstepped his legal authority to impose his “liberation day” measures last year.

The 21-year-old man who was shot and killed after having entered Donald Trump’s Florida resort on Sunday – while carrying a shotgun – came from a North Carolina family of the president’s supporters and had reportedly become increasingly fixated on the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

The focus of the FBI’s investigation into the intrusion attributed to Austin Tucker Martin is tightening on his movements and motives. Martin was confronted by Secret Service agents and a local sheriff’s deputy inside the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago and killed after he had raised a shotgun into the shooting position at about 1.30am on Sunday, law enforcement said.

The US supreme court has decided to hear arguments in a climate accountability lawsuit, marking the first time the high court has weighed in on such a case. The decision could potentially hinder the wave of climate litigation the US has seen in recent years.

The FBI director, Kash Patel, has a lot on his plate just now. There’s the shooting death of the armed man who entered Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home; the weeks-old search for missing Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie; not to mention the ongoing furor around the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

So eyebrows were raised on Sunday when phone footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with the men’s USA hockey team in Milan after their gold medal victory against Canada at the Winter Olympics.

Most US adults think Donald Trump is moving the country in the wrong direction during his second presidency, according to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released the day before his State of the Union speech.

Whole areas of western Mexico have been all but shut down after a surge in cartel violence sparked by a military raid that killed one of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, known as “El Mencho”.

The US military launched a strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean, which killed three men – its third such attack over the course of a week.

A trio of Senate Democrats is calling for the government to start refunding roughly $175bn in tariff revenues that the supreme court ruled were collected because of an illegal set of orders by Donald Trump.

Millions of people in New York City and a large swath of the north-eastern US were stuck at home under road travel bans and blizzard warnings on Monday as heavy snow and strong winds intensified, creating whiteout conditions in the densely populated region.

Ralph Abraham, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s principal deputy director, has stepped down, the agency said on Monday, announcing the exit of a top official for the second time in February.

Major institutions of higher education in the US are reckoning with the latest release of the Epstein files after discovering the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with board members, professors and administrators on campuses across the country.