President Donald Trump issued a foreboding proclamation during a speech in Maryland on Tuesday, just hours after he predicted a “Midterm Surprise!” in a Truth Social post.
“Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, who’s fantastic, he’s on a job, we have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks. Right, Russ?” Trump said. “He’s gonna be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion. He’s got some great things happening.”
Trump did not expand on what these so-called “surprises” would be.
Outside his role in the Trump administration, Vought is the primary architect of Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term.
While not mentioned specifically by Trump, many critics online speculated that Trump was referring to some sort of plan to interfere in the midterm elections.
“Between this and his ‘midterm surprise,’ the time to prepare for him to try to steal an election is now,” Fox News host Jessica Tarlov wrote on X.
Other commenters suggested that Vought could use his official capacity to interfere with the elections.
“I know nothing about Project 2025”
-Trump, 2024
I genuinely don’t see him invading Iran. It’s a guaranteed belly-flop. Much more likely he continues pretending the US already won.
Bibi will wave the tape, and then he will.
I don’t think so. It’s not as if longstanding, bipartisan US policy isn’t antagonistic towards Iran for its own reasons. I do think Bibi helped coax Trump into actually bombing Iran by giving him a rosy assessment, but even Trump won’t fall for that twice.
I hope you are right, ofcourse. But things are getting so unpredictable and illogical that I really don’t know what to expect.
I hear ya. What actually worries me is if Europe decides to involve itself militarily. I think the chance is slim, but that’s the only way I could see any attempted invasion of Iran. They are in a very tight spot with energy, and they seem to be 100% against negotiating with Russia, while also 100% unable (or unwilling) to influence Trump regarding Iran. Hard to imagine they could dedicate any military resources towards Iran though, considering what they already send to Ukraine, or want to deter Russia with. Still, as winter comes and fuel costs rise, something will have to give.
No, Iran invasion is pure fantasy. Europe can’t change that equation, not enough troops to spare and they’re not really built to fight outside of Europe in large numbers. Iran will need millions of soldiers committed. The US barely has 400,000 combat soldiers.
For instance how are they even going to get the border of Iran? They can’t go in from Pakistan or Central Asia and the US Navy is a hollowed out enshitified joke, so doing a naval invasion is even more absurd.
So they’ll have to invade and secure Iraq just to set the stage for an invasion of Iran. And that’s assuming they could defeat a combined Iran-Iraqi force. But how are they going to build up an invasion force? 2003 Iraq Invasion force took a year to build and that was in peaceful conditions with full control of the gulf and had intact bases.
The most that they can hope for is trying to take and hold the Islands in the strait. Which will fail and fail hard because Iran has had months and months prepare for it where as the US hasn’t committed a single soldier to combat and yet it’s logistics are at the breaking point and it’s defensive munitions are already spent! Trillion dollars a year well spent!
Militarily, the US is a barely a shadow of what it was just 20 years ago. It’s been thoroughly Russified.
I agree with pretty much everything you say here, but the last sentence.
I think we are safe there, as they will need at least 20 years to decide on that.