The "can of worms" that first lady Melania Trump opened up when she held a seemingly unprompted press conference about her ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein may be too much for President Donald Trump to survive, according to two analysts.

Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz discussed Melania Trump's recent press conference on a new episode of the podcast, "The Court of History." They speculated that Melania Trump must know something is about to be revealed about her ties to Epstein, otherwise she wouldn't have felt compelled to make some of the statements that she did.

Blumenthal described the address as a "can of worms" that the Trump administration has tried to avoid.

"Why is she so scared? That's the only question I have," Wilentz said. "Why would she do such a thing? The Epstein files have been off. He's blown up the Middle East in order to avoid the Epstein files. And here is Melania Trump coming out in the middle of nowhere saying, 'I had nothing to do with it in the way that you described.' Something's bugging her. She knows that something's coming. Obviously, something must be coming, or she wouldn't have done this."

Blumenthal compared the press conference to a scene in "The Godfather" where Frank Pentangeli denied the existence of the mafia.

"Instead of singing, she's clamming up," Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal also noted that Melania Trump's past dovetails with Donald Trump's attempt to purchase a modeling firm with Epstein and another business partner, and that the details of that relationship remain unknown.

US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.

Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.

“We’re already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack,” Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.

The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.

“You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked,” Fletcher said. “We’ve had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we’ll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty.”

Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.

“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion,” he said. “We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”

Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.

He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.

“A thousand dead humanitarians in three years,” Fletcher said. “When did that become normal?”

He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.

“Don’t just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected,” he said. “Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it.”

He said “big powers” view geopolitics in a highly “transactional” way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.

“I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are,” he said.

He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.

“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”

But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less “generous,” leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.

“Whether you’re making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you’re too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity,” he said, “all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we’re here to serve.”