A U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz went into effect Monday at 10 a.m. EST at the direction of President Donald Trump, but in a matter of hours, the blockade was breached without incident by at least four Iran-linked vessels, BBC reported Tuesday.
On Monday, Trump said that he had instructed the U.S. Navy to “seek and interdict every vessel in international waters that has paid a toll to Iran,” and the U.S. military later said that the “blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas.”
However, ship tracking data analyzed by BBC Verify revealed that at least four Iran-linked vessels “crossed the Strait of Hormuz” without incident; two on Monday, and two overnight.
“The Rich Starry, a tanker that is sanctioned by the United States under a different name, sailed through the strait overnight Monday,” CBS News reported, with the outlet having also analyzed ship tracking data. “The Elpis, another sanctioned tanker, sailed through the strait after the blockade began, having apparently come from the Iranian port of Bushehr, according to tracking data.”
The Rich Starry is a U.S.-sanctioned Chinese oil tanker, and was the first vessel to breach the blockade since its implementation Monday morning. The Chinese government called the United States’ blockade "dangerous and irresponsible,” with Chinese President Xi Jinping warning that the world must not be allowed to “revert to the law of the jungle,” NBC News reported.
Despite news organizations having analyzed tracking data, the outlets could not confirm whether or not the Iran-linked vessels had broadcasted false location reports using a tactic called "spoofing," which CBS News describes as a method to conceal a vessel's true location.
Trump’s decision to respond to Iran’s partial blockade of the Strait of Hormuz with another blockade has baffled experts, including Karen Young, a senior scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who toldCNN on Sunday that Trump’s blockade would only exacerbate the increasing scarcity of oil.
Hungary’s most consequential election in decades has just delivered an important victory for democracy and accountability.
For Hungarians, opposition leader Péter Magyar’s emphatic defeat of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz Party ends 16 years of corruption and quasi-authoritarianism.
The outcome will also be felt widely, from Moscow to Washington and beyond.
In a contest characterised as a referendum on whether Hungary should pivot west or continue its authoritarian drift, Magyar’s victory is a stern rebuke to the dark, transnational forces of nativism, division and the politics of resentment that have become part of mainstream political discourse.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the election was not the turnout (more than 74%, shattering previous records), or even the result (a two-thirds supermajority for Magyar’s Tisza party, winning at least 138 of 199 parliamentary seats).
Both had been predicted for some time, and Orbán’s soft authoritarianism had always left the door ajar for a possible opposition victory at the polls.
Rather, the biggest surprise might have been Orbán’s immediate concession. He didn’t try to manufacture a crisis or use his security services to hold onto power. Given the strength of anti-government sentiment in Hungary, such a move could have led to a “colour revolution” – the type of massive street protests seen previously in Ukraine, Georgia and other countries.
This could have turned bloody. Liberal Hungarians, and the European Union more broadly, will be heaving a collective sigh of relief.
Why Orbán was suddenly vulnerable
Having won office, Magyar will need to move quickly but also carefully to bring change, so as not to alienate too many former Fidesz voters.
He has already asked President Tamaś Sulyok to resign, along with other Orbán loyalists. The Tisza supermajority in parliament is important here. It will be required for constitutional amendments to dismantle the architecture of Orbán’s authoritarian state.
Fortunately, this will be easier in Hungary than fully fledged autocratic systems. Indeed, Orbán’s longevity can somewhat be attributed to the fact that his brand of authoritarianism was only partial.
Certainly, it had the structural elements of an autocracy. That included widespread, government-controlled gerrymandering to ensure Fidesz victories, and the cynical diversion of state funds to cities and provinces controlled by Orbán’s political allies.
In addition, the nationalised media ecosystem was heavily supportive of the government, although alternative voices kept debate alive via foreign-owned news organisations.
But Orbán’s success also came from facing weak and easily fragmented or coopted oppositions. Magyar – a former Orbán ally – ran a disciplined campaign that nullified the electoral advantage for Fidesz.
Ultimately, though, when voters have a choice – even a constrained one – they will eventually reject governments that rely on blame and victimhood to mask their inability to offer people a better future.
Under Orbán, Hungary was consistently ranked the most corrupt nation in Europe. In 2025, it ranked last in the EU on relative household wealth. It had also suffered rampant inflation and economic stagnation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Video footage of country estates built by Hungary’s elites, complete with zebras roaming the grounds, perfectly symbolised the popular outrage with wealth inequality.
A setback for Putin, Trump and right-wing populism
Hungary’s new start also sends a powerful message to other nations. Clearly the biggest loser from the election is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which had hastily tapped Kremlin powerbroker Sergey Kiriyenko and a team of “political technologists” to assist Orbán.
Under Orbán, Hungary was the strongest pro-Kremlin voice in the EU. It regularly stymied aid packages for Ukraine, tied up decision-making on the war in bureaucratic processes, and held the European Commission to ransom by threatening hold-out votes.
In fact, just days before the election, Bloomberg published a transcript of a phone call between Orbán and Putin from October 2025, in which Orbán compared himself to a mouse helping free the caged Russian lion.
This came on the back of revelations that Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, and other Hungarian officials had regularly been leaking confidential EU discussions to Moscow.
Another loser from the Hungarian election is the Trump White House.
The pre-election Budapest visit by US Vice President JD Vance to shore up support for Orbán was breathtakingly hypocritical. Vance farcically demanded an end to foreign election meddling, while engaging in precisely that. The White House then doubled down, with Trump promising on Truth Social to aid Orbán with the “full Economic Might of the United States”.
JD Vance puts Donald Trump on speakerphone during a speech in Hungary.
Now, though, Trump is very publicly on the losing side. And like the debacle of his Iran war, he tends to chafe at losing.
The election also shows that US foreign interference campaigns are not invulnerable, though the White House will doubtless continue excoriating Europe. The Trump administration’s view that Europe is heading for “civilisational erasure”, necessitating US efforts to “cultivate resistance” and “help Europe correct its current trajectory” is documented in its 2025 National Security Strategy.
But the broader movements representing what Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar calls the “Putinisation of global politics” have been repudiated by Hungary’s election result.
Under Orbán, Hungary was a hub for ultraconservative voices. Think tanks like the MAGA-boosting US Heritage Foundation and Hungary’s Danube Institute regularly held prominent dialogues bemoaning Europe’s capitulation to wokeism.
The Hungarian iteration of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), sponsored by the American Conservative Union, was a key calendar for Western right-wing politicians and commentators, including former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
China will also be keenly watching Magyar’s new government, especially since it has viewed Hungary as a soft entry point to the EU. The large-scale investment in electric vehicle manufacturing, especially battery production, are part of a growing Chinese business footprint in the country.
For Beijing, the question will be whether Magyar seeks to sacrifice this lucrative investment to burnish his European credentials.
What about the winners?
In addition to Hungarians outside Orbán’s orbit of elites, the EU will welcome the news that it remains an attractive force.
Ukraine, too, may find it easier to secure European assistance. At the very least, smaller Ukraine detractors like Slovakia will have to choose between acquiescing quietly or thrusting themselves uncomfortably into the open.
And with the US midterm elections fast approaching, far-right American politicians, including Trump himself, will be studying Hungary’s lessons closely. If they conclude that Orbán’s brand of authoritarianism was too soft, a more hardline path looms as an ominous alternative.
Despite being entangled in the ongoing U.S. war against Iran, President Donald Trump is actively considering an operation to abduct another world leader, much like his administration had in January with the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, three insiders revealed to Zeteo in its report Tuesday.
“In recent days, according to two sources familiar with the situation and another person briefed on it, officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US government were quietly given a new directive that came straight from the Trump White House,” Zeteo’s report reads. “The message: ramp up your preparations for possible military operations against Cuba.”
The Trump administration is currently starving Cuba of resources with crippling sanctions that have shuttered hospitals and made food scarce. However, according to the three inside sources who spoke with Zeteo, the White House is considering accelerating its attempt to topple the Cuban government with a major military operation.
“It appears that Trump has not made a final decision yet on military action, and negotiations to end Trump’s ‘economic bombing’ of the island’s civilian population are ongoing,” Zeteo’s report reads.
“If Trump doesn’t get what he wants, Zeteo is told that one option that has been discussed within the Trump administration is for the US military to conduct another abduction operation against some of the Cuban leadership, similar to its kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela early this year."
According to two of the insiders, Trump has grown “increasingly frustrated,” Zeteo reported, with “the open defiance from the Cuban government.” On Monday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel told NBC News that he and his fellow Cubans would “die” defending the Caribbean nation.
“An invasion to Cuba would have costs. ... It would affect the security of Cuba, the United States and of the region,” Díaz-Canel said. “If that happens, there will be fighting, and there will be a struggle, and we will defend ourselves, and if we need to die, we’ll die, because as our national anthem says, ‘Dying for the homeland is to live.’”
JD Vance’s less than impressive performance as vice president, combined with Donald Trump needling him in his comments to the press, led longtime Financial Times columnist Ed Luce to claim the veep’s star has faded to the point where he is becoming irrelevant.
And because of that, he no longer can be considered Trump’s successor.
In a brutally frank column Tuesday morning, headlined, “The ever-shrinking JD Vance,” Luce made the case that the president has diminished his running mate by sending him out to defend the indefensible and putting him in positions where failure is guaranteed.
“Pity JD Vance,” it began. “Having advised against Donald Trump’s Iran war, he was sent to Islamabad to fix it. En route to that doomed cause, the US vice-president stopped off in Hungary to endorse another — Viktor Orbán’s re-election campaign. The Iran talks failed and Orbán lost in a landslide. By the end of that tour from hell, Vance’s approval rating was the lowest ever for a vice-president at this point in a term.”
Noting that Vance’s job was never designed to be “fun,” he added that the former senator from Ohio is nonetheless “flailing” and the president has taken notice.
“He is thus no longer Trump’s obvious successor," Luce asserted before pointing out, “The president now makes a habit of lightly teasing Vance at public events. Gentle can quickly turn to savage if Trump loses respect. While Vance was in Pakistan, Trump was living it up in Miami with his chief rival, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state. Forget that America’s chief diplomat was absent from the most important bilateral talks of Trump’s presidency. The very moment Vance was announcing their collapse, Rubio was socializing with Trump at the ringside of an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout.”
Luce went on to note that Vance lacks the unshakeable base Trump has with his MAGA adherents, making it difficult to turn things around.
“Even were Vance to regain his place in the Trumpian firmament, there is no such thing as a Vance base. His standing relies solely on Trump. This presents Vance with two steep disabilities. The first is that he lacks standalone political charisma. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, calls Vance ‘The Cooler' after a movie about a charmless casino employee who brings misfortune to those around him,” he wrote before adding, “Vance would also suffer from the same handicap as Kamala Harris had with Joe Biden in 2024 — his record would be tied to that of his boss.”
“Which would leave Vance, and probably Rubio, with a poisoned chalice. History shows that people who get close to Trump pay a price. Trump’s number two is unlikely to buck that record,” he concluded.
President Donald Trump lavished praise Tuesday on Alan Dershowitz – a longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein and lawyer who helped secure Epstein’s unprecedentedly lenient plea deal in 2008 for child abuse – after Dershowitz floated a plan to help Trump expunge his 2019 impeachment.
“Alan, one of the greats, should do it!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social in reference to Dershowitz's proposal on how to expunge the president’s 2019 impeachment.
Trump was impeached in 2019 after the House found that the president had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election, but, according to Dershowitz, Trump could ask Congress – which is currently controlled by Republicans – to expunge the impeachment.
Dershowitz was not only Epstein’s attorney, but a close friend, according to reporting from The New Yorker. Their friendship was so strong that Epstein was the “only person outside his family whom he trusted to evaluate drafts of his books,” the New Yorker reported.
Like Epstein, Dershowitz has also faced allegations of assault, most notably from Virginia Giuffre, who claimed that Dershowitz had abused her when she was 17, an allegation Dershowitz has fiercely denied. Dershowitz has not faced any criminal charges related to the allegation.
In 2019, Dershowitz admitted to having received a massage by an adult woman at Epstein’s New York mansion in an interview with a local Florida news station, but claimed “I kept my underwear on during the massage,” and has continued to deny any wrongdoing.
President Donald Trump responded to a request for comment on supernatural experiences claimed by a high-ranking official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Gregg Phillips, the third-ranking official at FEMA, has been quietly sidelined from key operations following public reports that he claims to have teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Georgia, and CNN's KFILE reported that he has made other bizarre claims about personal experiences with the supernatural.
The controversial claims, made during podcast appearances over recent years, prompted the White House to urge Department of Homeland Security officials to remove Phillips from public view, according to a White House official.
“Everyone’s thoughts were, ‘What the hell is this? This guy has got to go,’” the official said.
KFILE contacted the president himself to ask about Phillips and his claims about teleportation.
“What does teleport mean?" Trump said. "Was he kidding?”
When told that Phillips was not kidding, Trump responded: “I don’t know anything about teleporting. … It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”
Phillips has recounted numerous extraordinary experiences across right-wing podcasts, including an incident at an Indianapolis Lowe's where he said he collapsed and disappeared for two hours, only to wake in a McDonald's parking lot across the street with 15,000 steps logged on his health app and a Big Mac in his lap.
Phillips has said many experiences occurred while treating metastatic bone cancer with ivermectin and fenbendazole — antiparasitic drugs commonly used for deworming animals — rather than pursuing conventional chemotherapy, and he claims that God sat on his bed and diagnosed him with cancer.
“He sat me up in the bed and he sat cross-legged with me – I’ll never forget it,” Phillips said, “and he said, ‘Hey, your cancer’s back, but don’t worry, I’ve got this.’”
In the same January 2025 podcast where he talked about teleportation, Phillips claims that a deceased girlfriend suddenly appeared inside his moving car – which he'd recently won in a poke game – and lifted it from the road to avoid crashing into an oncoming truck.
“The girl that I had dated came into the car with me, the girl that had died,” Phillips said. “She said ‘You’re not going to survive this. So I’m going to take you away,' and she lifted me and the car up and out of the way from a truck that had slid across the road and had come all the way across the road and was about to hit me.”
Phillips said these experiences happened so often that a friend jokingly referred to him as “God’s zombie," existing “half in and half out” of heaven to continue unfinished work for God.
“I’m actually dead,” Phillips said in April 2025. “But I’m here doing God’s stuff, and so we laugh about that a little bit.”
Within days of CNN's March report on the teleportation claims, Phillips was pulled from a scheduled Capitol Hill hearing and barred from posting about teleportation on Truth Social. He has since grown increasingly suspicious and agitated, according to multiple FEMA insiders.
Last week, newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin traveled to western North Carolina for Hurricane Helene recovery efforts without Phillips, despite his oversight of disaster response and recovery. The exclusion underscores Phillips's diminished role at the agency.
Despite the controversy, some senior FEMA officials have privately defended Phillips, arguing that his willingness to challenge agency leadership on staffing cuts and spending controls makes him valuable.
One official acknowledged the tension: "Yes, it's hard to trust the judgment of someone who said they teleported and then doubled down on it. But he seems to really care about people."
Children younger than 13 years old are under investigation by the FBI after the agency designated an online group as an “extremist” threat, a group whose members consist of a large number of children, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Tuesday.
“Publicly, the FBI casts these investigations as a crusade to protect the children from predatory adults. What they rarely mention is that many of the suspects are children themselves,” Klippenstein wrote in a report on his Substack. “To obscure this ugly reality, law enforcement portrays itself as merely focused on social media and gaming platforms – ones that just so happen to be popular among children, like Roblox.”
The Trump administration established its new Nihilistic Violent Extremist designation, in part, in response to the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, with many in the MAGA movement attempting to link Kirk’s killing with support for transgenderism, and despite no evidence that the suspected killer was motivated by such beliefs.
The new designation has also been cited by the Trump administration as a tool to provide “political cover” for its campaign against transgenderism, according to a national security official who spoke with Klippenstein on the condition of anonymity. The Trump administration has also used new standards to define domestic terrorism to justify heightened surveillance on peaceful protests, a leaked memo from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security has revealed.
“[Child] terrorism is what Europe and the commonwealth have embraced; and it’s what the Trump administration has signed onto with its war on Nihilistic Violent Extremism,” Klippenstein wrote. “What’s next, toddler terrorism?”
Appearing on MS NOW to expand upon her report on the meme war between Donald Trump’s White House and Iran on social media, which has become the latest tool for spreading propaganda, Politico’s Dash Burns claimed White House insiders admit things are not going well on multiple fronts.
“You know the old adage: a picture says a thousand words? I think a meme in this moment might say even more. The dog drinking the coffee with the fire around it; I was sent that twice from two separate sources close to the White House –– an oldie but a goodie. There were some religious-themed memes," she reported.
“Listen, the vibes aren't great,” she added. “The sources I was talking to were pointing to things like there's there's the religion theme that the president kicked off there, the DoorDash moment yesterday, for example, the president stepped on his own message there by attacking the pope, by posting that that Jesus-themed meme. Republicans were getting ready to hit the campaign trail talking about the economy. They're going to have a really hard time doing that right now because of what's happening with the war in Iran and what that's doing to prices back home.”
“I was talking to White House officials late last year on the record, and they were saying that this was going to be the moment when the big, beautiful bill would impact the voters that really need it the most,” she recalled. “And this is when voters would start to get excited to vote for Republicans in November, because they would see those tax refunds. Well, that is also all being overshadowed by the rising cost of living because of some of the issues abroad. So this is not where the administration wants to be. And this certainly is not where Republican allies of the administration who are trying to help boost Republicans in the midterms want to be.”
President Donald Trump is shedding supporters as he launches bombs and threats against Iran, insults the pope and rattles markets with his policies.
The 79-year-old president won re-election in 2024 with an eclectic alliance made up of MAGA diehards, crypto enthusiasts, non-white men, anti-war isolationists and right-wing Christians, but he has tested their loyalty in recent months with a series of erratic moves and bellicose statements, reported Axios.
"Trump is torching the coalition that made him president, seemingly unaware of — or simply unconcerned by — the depth of discontent permeating his movement," the website reported. "What Republicans celebrated as a once-in-a-generation coalition may turn out to be exactly that, never to be reassembled."
The president has alienated MAGA's Christian base with a profanity-laced Easter post threatening war crimes against Iran and praising Allah, while two days later he warned Iran that "a whole civilization will die tonight," sparking global fears of nuclear annihilation, and then Sunday night he slurred the American-born Pope Leo XIV as "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy" – but he wasn't quite done there.
"Within the hour, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure — healing a bedridden man, flanked by bald eagles and the American flag," Axios reported. "The image drew rare condemnation from MAGA loyalists, including allegations of blasphemy and even demonic possession."
The post was deleted Monday morning and insisted the image was supposed to depict him as a doctor, but Axios reported that the president's "war on his own coalition extends far beyond the pews."
"Trump has lashed out at the most powerful voices in the 'America First' ecosystem, disavowing erstwhile allies for their criticism of his Iran war," Axios reported. "The fallout is tearing through the broader MAGA media world, forcing influencers who've spent years in lockstep to publicly pick sides."
The Iran war, the Epstein files and suspicious trading activity around Trump announcements have driven away younger, so-called podcast populists, while controversies involving the Trump family's crypto venture has cast doubts among true believers, and Trump's tariffs have hit farmers and sowed economic fears among his non-white supporters.
"The coalition that got Trump elected is completely fractured and in smithereens," said conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, who has feuded with the president over Iran. "The question is now not who has Trump lost. The question is who remains."
JD Vance’s decision to add to Donald Trump’s attacks against Pope Leo XIV earned him a scolding on MS NOW on Tuesday morning as “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough called him out for lecturing the Catholic leader on “morality.”
Adding to the Trump administration’s all-out attack on arguably the world’s most powerful religious leader, Vance told Fox News, “I certainly think that in some cases, it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on with the Catholic church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”
After sharing the clip, which Scarborough introduced by sarcastically calling it “delightful,” he condescendingly explained to the vice president, “That's exactly what he's talking about, buddy. Come on, pal, he's talking about matters of morality.”
“Pope after pope after pope has been critical of war,” he elaborated. “He's been critical when people have been oppressed, like people have been oppressed in the United States because of mass deportation policies. I don't know a pope, –– I don't know, I mean, I got criticized when on certain votes I took when I was in congress by the Catholic bishops, you know, they sent out a scorecard and everything. And, you know, that's just what they've been doing forever.”
“And for you to think, well, first of all, for the president, think he can portray himself as Jesus and get away with that, even with the biggest suck ups –– I mean, it's one thing, but to say, stick to matters of morality, that's exactly what the pope is doing.”
A newly unearthed FBI document appears to directly contradict First Lady Melania Trump’s surprise statement last week regarding how she met her husband, President Donald Trump, and whether Jeffrey Epstein had played a role.
Last week, Mrs. Trump stunned onlookers by issuing a statement – seemingly unprompted – denying having had a relationship with Epstein, and denying allegations that the disgraced financier had been the one to introduce her to Trump. Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who now serves as Trump’s special envoy, later claimed that he was the one to introduce Mrs. Trump to her future husband.
But according to a 2019 FBI interview summary report, one witness – a female from Poland who claimed to have worked for Epstein in the mid-2000s – claimed it was not Zampolli who introduced Mrs. Trump to the future president, but rather, Epstein himself.
“EPSTEIN introduced MELANIA TRUMP to DONALD TRUMP,” the FBI summary document reads, written by an FBI special agent whose name was redacted.
In her statement last week, Mrs. Trump explicitly denied that she had been introduced to her future husband by Epstein, saying that she instead met Mr. Trump “by chance, at a New York City party in 1998,” noting that further details of the encounter were “documented in detail in my book, MELANIA.” Zampolli, long a close friend to Mr. Trump, backed up Mrs. Trump’s claim that same week by calling the allegation that Epstein introduced the two “nonsense.”
According to the witness interview by the FBI in 2019, however, not only did Epstein introduce Mrs. Trump to Mr. Trump, but "the agent" – presumably Zampolli, based on context – had an “affair” with the witness, and had also attempted to purchase Elite Model Management – a French modeling agency that represented Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, when she was 15 years old – with Epstein.
“[Redacted] had an affair with the agent. ZEMPOLI was trying to buy Elite Models with EPSTEIN,” the report reads. “EPSTEIN was visiting ZEMPOLI at the agency when there were casting auditions for models. EPSTEIN was looking through portfolios and saw [Redacted’s] photograph of her wearing only swim bottoms.”
During her statement last week, Mrs. Trump also appeared to acknowledge sending a 2002 email to Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s currently serving a 20-year sentence for child abuse. In the email, a sender named “Melania” complimented who is believed to be Maxwell on her appearance in a New York Magazine article, and exchanged pleasantries. Mrs. Trump dismissed the email as nothing more than “casual correspondence.”
Trump, Mrs. Trump and Zampolli are not facing any criminal charges or accusations of wrongdoing. The claims of the witness whose interview was summarized by the FBI have not been verified by the agency.
One of the largest stakeholders in the Trump family's crypto venture accused the company of bilking investors.
Crypto billionaire Justin Sun alleged that World Liberty Financial grants company officials with unilateral authority over user accounts – including the power to freeze them – and an independent analysis found the value of his personal stake in the company has shriveled while he's been locked out of his account, reported NBC News.
“I have always been an ardent supporter of President Trump and his crypto friendly policy,” Sun posted Monday on X. "[However,] this is the opposite of decentralization. This is a trap door marketed as an open door. I denounce the ongoing token scandals by the bad actors at WLFI.”
Sun claims his own account has been frozen since September, preventing him from selling his holdings, and the blockchain tracking group Bubblemaps found the value of that stake has declined by more than $80 million, to about $43 million, while he's been unable to access his account.
"I am the first and single largest victim, as a result of their wrongful blacklisting of my WLFI token wallet back in 2025, that violates basic investor rights and blockchain principles of fairness," Sun wrote on X.
"Every action taken by the WLFI team to extract fees from users, to secretly implant backdoor controls over user assets, to freeze investor funds without disclosure or due process, and to treat the crypto community as a personal ATM — all of these actions are illegitimate and were never authorized by any fair, transparent, or good-faith community governance process," the investor added.
World Liberty responded to Sun's claims with an apparent threat of a lawsuit and accused the crypto mogul of engaging in misconduct himself, alluding to a civil fraud lawsuit filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 that he settled last month by agreeing to pay a $10 million fine.
"Does anyone still believe @justinsuntron?" WLFI posted on X. "Justin’s favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. Same playbook, different target. WLFI isn't the first. We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal."
World Liberty was founded in 2024 – in the midst of Trump's third presidential campaign – by the president's three sons and lists him as co-founder emeritus, and the company lured investors with a promise to become a world leader in the crypto and decentralized finance space.
The value of the company's primary token, known as WLFI, has lost 74 percent, and was trading Monday at around 8 cents each, although its stablecoin, USD1, is among the 10 most heavily used stablecoins, which are crypto tokens set up to be traded on par with the U.S. dollar.
World Liberty borrowed $75 million from another crypto group, Dolomite, in February, using 5 percent of the entire supply of WLFI as collateral, and some investors expressed concern at the time about whether the company could repay the loan if the token continued to decline in value.
Company officials insisted last week that World Liberty was “nowhere near liquidation,” saying it would simply supply more collateral if the value continued to decline.
"We are one of the largest suppliers and borrowers on WLFI Markets. Yes, we supplied WLFI as collateral and borrowed stablecoins," WLFI posted on X. "No, we are nowhere near liquidation — and frankly, even if markets moved dramatically against us, we'd simply supply more collateral. That's not a risk. That's how this works."
However, crypto consultant Austin Campbell said concerns about the loan arrangement appear to be legitimate.
“If you took this conduct and translated it to traditional markets, you would have some problems,” said Campbell, an instructor at New York University.
Donald Trump's Iran struggle has exposed a fundamental truth: the world no longer fears American threats, and traditional allies are abandoning Washington to form new partnerships.
According to Politico's Nahal Toosi, Trump faces a wall of resistance from longtime U.S. allies who are actively forming new alliances and sidelining America as a diplomatic partner. In recent days, multiple global players have openly defied the president, exposing the severe limits of American influence.
The core problem is philosophical. "Trump and his aides often appear to operate as if most other people on the planet are 'non-player characters' in a video game," and they believe that America can use "threats, economic muscle and military action to bend other capitals to its will," Toosi observed.
But foreign policy doesn't work that way and the Politico analyst suggested the current administration is "not adjusting well" to a changed world.
Trump shows no signs of learning from this reality. Richard Haass, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, observed: "If there were an appreciation that bullying was no longer a likely to succeed tactic you'd see a move away from it, but there's no real sign that Trump is doing so."
The problem is structural. "He is surrounded by 'yes' people," one senior European diplomat fumed.
Diplomacy requires reciprocity — a concept Trump's team appears incapable of grasping. "If you want something from somebody you have to give them something, unless like in World War II they've truly surrendered. It can't just be 'we're going to keep beating you,'" said a Western diplomat based in the Middle East.
Trump's tariffs are accelerating the divorce. Other countries are actively finding new trading partners beyond the U.S., reducing their economic reliance on America. As nations decrease their military and economic dependence on Washington, they become less likely to heed American demands in the future.
The fundamental misunderstanding runs deeper. Many foreign affairs experts worry that Trump treats global conflicts as real estate deals, reducing complex geopolitical issues to mere land disputes. But "identity, politics and the desire to simply survive as a people is what fuels many conflicts," not purely material calculations,' he wrote.
Trump and his team "fail to realize that people tend to fight for what gives their life meaning beyond the purely rational or material cost-benefit analysis," according to a former Latin American official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the sensitive topic.
