As President Trump attempted to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, it became clearer and clearer that the deal was not possible. Trump was never going to sign a JCPOA 2.0. deal.

Some people on the Right were complaining that President Trump wasn’t acting like Barack Obama. But it was never a MAGA position to be Barack Obama. Donald Trump said for ten years that the JCPOA was the worst deal in American history. He was never going back to it.

As new details emerge as the levels of coordination and talking between the United States and Israel over this current wave of attacks, it is clear that President Trump was actually playing 4D chess with all of this.

He put Iran in a box to keep them there and allow for the possibility of Israel to destroy their nuclear facilities and large swaths of their military capability, with no risk to American troops.

The president was asked by the Wall Street Journal about whether he was given a heads-up by the Israeli government. He replied, “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, ‘We know what’s going on.’”

President Trump is being very clear about this. It appears the United States was not just read in on the operation. Think of the extent to which this was a 4D chess plan, in which the appearance of negotiations with Steve Witkoff was actively put forward by the United States in order to sucker the Iranians into going to sleep after it was clear that the Iranians were not making a deal.

It’s quite plausible that the United States was involved in a disinformation operation targeted directly at the Iranian government.

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In any case, tactical surprise was not only achieved, it was achieved in historic fashion. And that looks a lot like 4D chess with plausible deniability from the United States. That’s what it looks like from the outside and from all of the information that’s being released, including from President Trump.

On Friday morning, President Trump put out a series of statements. He told Jon Karl of ABC:

I think it’s been excellent. We gave them a chance. And they didn’t take it. They got hit hard, very hard. They got hit about as hard as you’re going to get hit. And there is more to come, a lot more.

President Trump’s first statement came last night:

I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to “just do it,” but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come – And they know how to use it. Certain Iranian hardliners spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!

Remember peace through strength? This is what it looks like. This is what Trump’s foreign policy looks like. It’s what it’s always looked like. Anyone who is surprised by this has been ignoring what President Trump has been saying and doing for his entire time as president of the United States.

There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!

President Trump’s first response to the Israeli attack was:

Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb. We hope to return to the negotiating table. We’ll see. There are some people in the leadership who won’t return.

Yup.

Trump said this morning:

Two months ago I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to ‘make a deal.’ They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!

What Iran should do, if they had any brains at all, would be to come to President Trump on bended knee and beg him, beg him to let them give up their nuclear program in exchange for the ayatollahs remaining alive and the regime not being threatened and the elimination of sanctions. The Iranian regime does not have any forward operating capacity. They just don’t.

President Trump has made it clear over and over and over that Iran could have stopped this at any time. All they had to do was say, “Fine, no nuclear program,” and that would have been the end of it. Instead, they decided they were going to keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing.

And President Trump played this absolutely perfectly. Israel acted alone. Israel acted with its own capacity. Israel is doing this by itself. And the United States is saying, “Listen, Israel is our ally. Our interests and the Israeli interests align on Iran not having a nuclear weapon. But this is Israel’s fight predominantly and foremost. And Israel is an independent country making its own decisions.”

And this is what really matters here. Israel is saying to the entire region that if you screw with Israel, these will be the consequences.

And Donald Trump, the most supportive American president Israel has ever known, had their back.

The name Israel used for its military operation targeting Iran may have extraordinary meaning for the people of Iran, who have suffered under the tyrannical, despotic Islamic regime for 46 years.

The Israelis named the mission “Operation Rising Lion,” derived from Numbers 23:24, in which the prophet Balaam — who was hired by King Balak of Moab to curse Israel, but was directed by God to bless Israel instead — declaimed of the Jewish people, “Behold! The people will arise like a lion cub and raise itself like a lion.”

But the imagery of a lion rising may also have tremendous significance for the people of Iran — the flag of Iran for four centuries before the Islamic regime took over in 1979 was a lion with the sun rising on the stripes of green, white, and red. The Islamic regime replaced the lion with a stylized version of Allah and the phrase “Allahu Akbar” along the edges of the green and red stripes.

Rising Lion is a beautiful name for the operation, reminding the people of Iran that Israel is not their enemy, and looks forward to peace and friendship as the Lion rises to where he was before '79. https://t.co/ORgHrmO760 pic.twitter.com/zlEUs7tD5w

— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) June 13, 2025

The lion and sun flag is still used by some Iranians as a symbol of opposition to the current government. In 1980, after adopting the Islamic flag, the regime made it a punishable offense to use the lion and sun flag.

“There is a common misconception that the Lion and Sun flag is the symbol of the Pahlavi Dynasty,” the National Union for Democracy in Iran notes. “Though the flag was used during the Pahlavi Dynasty, it is an ancient, national symbol the history of which dates back to the twelfth century. It is, indeed, Iran’s symbol. It has been discovered on banners and as being used as a popular coat of arms to represent Iran as early as the fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century, during the Safavid Dynasty, the Lion and Sun first appeared on Iran’s official flag.”

In 2009, a movement arose in Iran to rid the country of the Islamic regime. Called the “Green Movement,” reports said scores of protesters were killed by the regime. Then-President Obama refused to help the protesters. “Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support,” Eli Lake recalled. According to Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, author of “The Iran Wars,” Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with supporters of the movement.

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“The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon wrote. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

In January 2023, Radio Free Europe reported, “At least 522 people have been killed in four months of anti-government protests in Iran, said a report issued on January 15 by the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). Among the dead are 70 minors and 68 security forces, the agency reported. Nearly 20,000 people had been arrested, 110 on charges that could lead to a death sentence, it said.”