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BREAKING: Trump Delays Attacks on Iran’s Energy /Lt Col Daniel Davis
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Yesterday, I warned you that President Trump was ready to pull the trigger.
That he was then only 24 hours away from making good on his ultimatum that he had given
to Iran on the 21st.
You either open the straight-of-war moves, or we are going to bring death and destruction
like you've never seen.
We're going to decimate Iran all this.
Then today, at 7, little after 7, 7, 20, or 7, 30 this morning, something different
and President Trump explains it himself.
I think this is something that's going to happen, and why wouldn't it happen?
So, tomorrow, morning, sometime, their time, we were expected to blow up their largest
electric generating plants that cost over $10 billion to build.
It's a very good one.
There was no death of money, and one shot, it's gone.
It collapses.
Why would they want that?
So, they call, I didn't call, they call, they want to make a deal, and we are very willing
to make a deal.
It's got to be a good deal, and it's got to be no more wars, no more nuclear weapons.
They're not going to have nuclear weapons anymore.
They're agreeing to that.
Any of that stuff is no deal.
So, apparently, the Iranians, they blinked.
They were quaking in their boots.
They were terrified of all these damages that would be done to them, and even though
they had talked about a big game, about how they were going to hit other Gulf region,
or other allies in the region, hit Americans, either Israelis, etc.
desalination plants, all kinds of big scary things that they said, apparently all that
was nonsense.
Because Trump, this is what happened.
This was released, you see, it's 7.23 this morning.
President Trump said, I am pleased to report, and this is all caps, too.
This is, even this is a little odd, even for him, I usually selects all caps, but this
one is all caps.
I am pleased to report that the United States of America and the country of Iran have had
over the last two days, very good and productive conversations.
Remember that here in just a second, regarding complete and total resolution of our hostilities
in the Middle East, based on the tenor and tone of the in-depth, detailed, and constructive
conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of
War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy
and infrastructure for a five-day period subject to the success of the ongoing meetings
and discussions.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, he weirdly always says at the end.
So there you have it, so with no explanation at 7.23, remember that time, too.
He says, you know what?
Because of these long conversations we've been having, then that's it, we're not going
to do that and we're going to continue talking to get a complete resolution.
You heard him say in that opening sound about there, you know, he's saying, you know, this
is everything.
This is the nuclear program, this is the long-range missiles, you know, and the whole thing,
we want to get the whole war over with.
Now you may be thinking, okay, wait, all of this is making my head spin because we are
just bouncing back and forth to prior to this on the 26th to 27th of February.
We're in the heated middle of negotiations at the end.
It looks like the foreign minister, Ovan, Oman, foreign minister Abbas, Iraqi of Iran,
and also the even Steve Wood call prior to that, of course, it said, hey, we're making
good progress.
And then, bam, here comes the war of the next day, the 28th of February, and they were
off to the races.
And then President Trump says, yeah, we're not talking about, in fact, we practically
won this.
I lost count of how many times he said, we have all the decimated Iran, they're basically
militarily defeated and he rattled off a bunch of statistics, but they kept on firing
missiles.
In fact, after about the fifth or sixth of March, the number of missiles and drones continued
to escalate, didn't really have an explanation for that.
And then all of a sudden, he comes in with this big truth social, says that's it, we're
going to, we're going to just decimate them.
We're going to blow up their energy infrastructure if the straight of Hormuz is in open.
And of course, I've been telling you, this ticking time clock, so to speak, of the process
of oil continuing to go up CNBC suggested last week that it could be, if the thing is not
resolved by the end of the month, and we're getting closer to that every day, the
process could be up around $120, $150 a barrel, if there's no resolution.
Well, that was obviously on Trump's mind as he had this, you know, this ticking time clock
trying to figure out what he's going to do.
One would also imagine that he was talking to his military and they told him that Iran
almost surely was serious about their reaction and retaliation to the Gulf Arabs, states to
Israel, to the United States assets in the region.
That had also to play into his mind.
Well, this morning, just hours ago, actually less than an hour ago, just a little bit of
time.
Maria Bartiromo and Fox News reports a couple of things here.
First of all, at 8.30, so that's barely an hour after President Trump made that truth
social.
She says that Iranian state TV said that Trump capitulated that there are no direct or indirect
talks taking place with the Trump regime.
That's what they said.
This is from a spokesman for the IRGC.
It's also interesting Axios itself has been reporting that there are indirect talks with
Egypt and Qatar with the kind of mediating between the United States and Iran.
No mention of any of that, no mention of any of their aspirations at all.
But then she says about 45 minutes after that, she said, I just spoke with President Trump
and he told me that Iran wants to make a deal and he said in that sound about there.
They called me.
I didn't call them.
They definitely wanted.
He's trying to characterize this as that they blinked.
He said the most recent talks happened last night with Steve Whitkopf and Jared Kushner
and their counterparts.
Meanwhile, you have the Iranians saying, no, we didn't do anything like that.
In fact, this is a Iranian member of parliament and this is also this morning.
This is about 9.15, this is because this is 9.15 U.S. time because of the United States
realized that Iran had entered an existential conflict and would definitely act on its threat.
It cowardly broke down.
Now, listen, if you're wondering what President Trump may be up to here, there's a lot of
different theories.
Right now, this is literally just like less than two hours old, so we're two and a half
hours old.
So we got to figure, look at what we have and like we always do, what people say, then we'll
look at physical evidence of what things are true on the ground and see if we can come
up with a good idea of what's really going on.
First big time result was that ticking clock, I keep telling you about, the ticker of
the price of oil, you see this morning it was right at $100, just a little under.
I think it actually ticked over there earlier in the morning.
Then you see that huge spark drop and look at that time.
Would you notice that right about, I don't know, 7.23 AM, there's a massive drop off.
Now, it's kind of picked up a little bit since then because I think people are saying,
wait, is it really, is the danger really over?
But nevertheless, it is trending $90.
So that's $8 less than it was on Friday.
We'll see where that goes throughout the rest of the day.
So definitely, Trump had that on his mind when he cleared this off.
But then the question, everybody has to answer is, where is this going?
What is the intent here?
And is there any solution on the map?
I mean, you can say whatever you want.
You can get this big drop on the price of oil for today.
But if Trump had actually been in conversation, meaning Steve Whitcock and Jared Kushner,
with the Iranians, if what he said was true in the Iranians actually did come to him and
that they were trying to get his resolution, remember there was a good resolution on the
table before the violence started, before Trump chose to start the war.
Never forget that because they were offered some big time concessions that they had never
literally never done before on the eve of the war.
But then now then one can imagine those are over.
In fact, now that they're saying that they're not even willing to talk about nuclear enrichment,
they're not even willing to talk about any of those things.
They're willing to talk about the expulsion of the United States, reparations, and security
guarantees for themselves.
It's their three main points that they've been saying for at least the last week in public.
So one would imagine where is the sudden turnaround here?
Was it just because Trump threatened to do that?
Well, you see that the initial reaction, both reported by Maria Bartiromo and by the member
of parliament in Iran itself, they're both saying no.
And look, we got to look at this.
Just look at this.
You talk about making your head spin.
Just take a look at some of these things right here folks.
This is, first of all, from March to 20th.
So let's fraud it.
You see, President Trump says we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider
winding down our great military efforts in the Middle East.
So basically it's all over.
And then he lists all these things that we've done.
We've destroyed their missiles.
We've destroyed their industrial capacity, eliminated their navy and blah, blah, blah.
All this stuff, tactics, our details, statistics about what he claims he's done.
That's on the 20th.
On the 21st, however, the very next day, he says if Iran doesn't fully open without
threat, the straight and four moves within 48 hours of this exact point in time, the United
States will obliterate their various power plants, blah, blah, blah.
Right?
Then on the next day, that's yesterday.
Now he says just almost past tense.
Now with the death of Iran, the greatest end of America and the radical happening, they
switch over to domestic stuff there, but this starts off with the death of Iran.
And then now here we are this day.
So three, yeah, four consecutive days.
Now all of a sudden, he's pleased to report that we have a very good productive negotiations
and the deadline is now pushed back.
And so one has to wonder, where is this going to go now?
And one other thing to show you, this is what he said last night, understand that.
This was last night President Trump said that Sunday that the results of an ultimatum
to Iran with fully reopened straight would be very good predicting that it would lead
to Iran's total decimation.
And you're going to find out soon, it's going to be very good for us.
This is what he told Israeli media last night, our time.
And then of course, now he's saying this morning, you know what, never mind all that.
So one would say, okay, he was still just putting a little pressure on them until they finally
buckled and their knees gave way and they ended up giving it.
But so far, we've seen nothing.
There's nothing that Iran has said that they were willing to give.
There's nothing that President Trump has even said that they're willing to negotiate.
They're willing to give away.
And just saying that they're willing to talk, I mean, that would be, that would be kind
of weird and obviously foolish.
If you said I had an ultimatum and you will open the straight of Hormuz within 48 hours
or this is going to happen and they said, well, we'll just keep talking.
Well then why would you back down from your, your deadline?
That doesn't make any sense.
And unless they said something, unless they're willing to do something because then what
is the ultimatum achieved?
It's bought more time for the Iranian side.
So they have, they have the ability, because so far they have agreed to nothing.
They've not even implied, Trump himself hasn't even implied that they've agreed to anything.
And the Iranians themselves have said, we didn't talk to anybody.
We didn't even have any negotiations.
And by the way, you're a coward.
Now you can imagine, you can, you can talk about public diplomacy and private diplomacy
and some things are said in public that are different than what said in the background.
It's normal.
But what you can't say, what you can't draw a logical conclusion is saying, well, because
their Iranians actually want to deal and they're just trying to put a, a, a brave face on
it.
And they're going to call the president of the United States a coward.
The morning of, after allegedly they're coming hat and hand and their knees have been
buckling because of the threat, that's not going to happen because that implies that
they are not going to have any kind of a negotiated settlement that's going to satisfy President
Trump.
And of course, the, almost the only thing he cares about right now as that chart on the
oil price showed you is a drop in the price of oil, getting the straight of hormones open
and keeping it open.
That's what he cares about.
And there's evidence to the, that we are nowhere to hear that that there's nothing changed
at all.
In fact, you can certainly imagine that many are saying it was the Iranians counter threat
to President Trump's ultimatum is what made his knees buckle.
And listen, there's, there's a lot of chaos in, in the U.S. right now.
Because remember, 723 is when he posted that.
Well at about 7am, you had Admiral Cooper go on and give this really dark and ominous
warning this morning, 23 minutes ahead of time to the Iranian people.
Continue to heed our, our advice.
We've had multiple messages that have come out that have said, beware, the government
doesn't care about you.
They're launching missiles and drones from populated areas, you need to stay inside for
right now.
Third, there will be a clear signal at some point as the president is indicated for you
to be able to come out.
So he was still seeming to operate on the assumption that the big strike was coming to not
at 7.44 pm eastern standard time, which is when the 48 hours would have expired.
And he's still giving warnings to the Iranian people.
They indoors, something really bad is coming.
But don't worry, the fatherly figure president Trump will soon give you the all clear and
then you can come out once that's taken care of.
So it certainly appears that the United States Central Command had no idea what was going
on.
They apparently thought everything was continuing where it had been before.
And that's not the only issues we also have the issue of Israel.
Sky news is reporting.
This is again, this is this morning at 8 am, this is when this report was published.
So the information was gathered before that, obviously, absolute chaos in the alliance.
Sky news confirms Israel is going rogue and the quote, lashing out with unilateral
strikes like they did with the South Park gas facilities completely defying the United
States.
Trump is losing control of Netanyahu and the divergence in strategy is massive.
Meanwhile, this other one here came after Trump made his statement.
This is from Netanyahu himself and says, we are working to bring Iran to places it has
never been before.
They will understand they are below and we are above.
Does that sound to you like somebody who's saying, you know what, we're on the verge of
a negotiated settlement.
President Trump with all of his diplomatic acumen is got this into good space and man, pretty
soon this war will be over and thank God the missiles will stop falling and all that, no,
because that's not what they want.
There's a reason why Iran chose to strike the South Park's gas field that was co owned
by Iran and Qatar, our ally and from which Iraq, our other ally in the region needed for
electricity generation.
There's a reason why that President Trump came out in angrily said, I didn't authorize
that because remember initially the report was that the Israeli side said, oh, definitely,
this was tightly coordinated with the United States, I tend to believe that because we know
that there has been incredible coordination between the leaders of central command and
the Israeli defense forces, we know that's for sure.
They've been, remember, they've been meeting the, the, the Admiral Cooper had been going
to send to Israel for quite a long time prior to this, making it very clear that everything
was tightly coordinated and then we know for sure that the attack itself was coordinated.
We know that the target sets that each side has are mutually reinforcing, but they're
not duplicitous, meaning that they're tightly coordinated.
So we do know that part.
So when you see the Israeli side attacking things that are not in our interest and that
completely contradict the idea of possibly reaching a negotiated settlement, it is very
clear that they are not on the same sheet as the United States.
So one might imagine that if there was any kind of movement towards Trump, whether he is,
you know, quote, chickening out like some say or, or just making a rational decision,
which I'd hardly encourage in support, having him attack these targets would have been
just catastrophic because there is every reason to believe that Iran would have made good
on their threat to retaliate and to shoot back and to destroy these things and to cripple
the other regions or allied countries in the region.
There's no reason to think they wouldn't have.
So it's wise for President Trump not to have done this.
Now, what that means is you've bought yourself a little time only because now that he's
still, even then, he only pushed it back five days.
Now one also has to wonder, maybe this is not so much a divergence with the Israelis.
It does appear that there's a lot of chaos inside the White House and the coordination
of the White House and the Pentagon.
That does seem to be afraid because it seems that Admiral Cooper was caught flat foot and
did not know that this was coming.
But one also has to wonder is, is this actually just yet another ploy by President
Trump to buy more time for military preparations?
Now recall back in January, January 13th to 14th if I'm not mistaken, it looked for all
the world and all the signals were coming out of the White House that the attack was coming
in.
But then apparently Netanyahu and maybe somebody else in Central Commander of the Pentagon
said, hey, we need a little bit more firepower.
We're not quite ready.
So they just patched the Ford carrier group.
So they added more power.
They added more air defense throughout the region that added more air assets.
Also tankers, fighter jets, everything, you name it, all that stuff was built up after
that.
And then it looked like again, they were going to be ready and something, well, we weren't
quite ready.
That's about the middle of February.
Then they said, just move it back further than, of course, then we know that in the process
of negotiations, again, after the third round, then that's when we struck.
When there was a fourth round planned, we struck again.
So we've already pulled out of the JCP away in 2018.
We were in the process five rounds of negotiations in 2025 when the Israelis attacked then and
then we joined it afterwards.
And then now three rounds heading into it.
So upon what basis would the Iranian side say, oh, yeah, sure, let's have another attempt
here.
And I think I've already seen some, at least the speculation on X and various counts that
the Iranian side has said, yeah, we already know this.
We know how you guys work.
We don't trust a word that you say.
So if you say you're holding this out for negotiations, which we claim we're not even
involved in, unless it's those terms that I put out at first, you withdraw from the
region, you pay reparations and their security guarantees for us for the future.
Apparently, they are willing to talk about that, but obviously that's nothing from us.
You may recall I showed you an Axios report over the weekend that said the US was indirectly
talking with Iran, trying to lay these six points down, which were detached from any kind
of reality.
The Iran would certainly never agree to any of those.
And then now here we still have them saying the same thing.
No, our three points haven't changed.
So then one wonders, then did Trump push this off because maybe he wants more combat power
in the region.
So we know that the USS Boxer, which is a WASP class amphibious assault ship and the
USS Tripoli are both in route at the moment.
You see each of these has a each is a 45 ton of worship that each have associated worships
that go along with them.
And you can see there the USS Boxer, the Tripoli, both have the same thing, which is F-35
stealth air fighter.
As you can see, these are basically small aircraft carriers, fighter jets, helicopters,
osprey aircraft, services, mobile military bases, seats.
So this would be adding to the Abraham Lincoln, which is still there.
The Ford has since departed because it had a fire on board, lots of actual difficulties.
It's heading back.
So one wonders is Trump just saying, hey, I need a little bit more time to build up this
combat power to be able to move in.
And then once the fire power is up, then we can start the attack here.
And then Trump will hit.
And once he has more of these Marines, maybe he's thinking, you know, we're going to take
Carg Island with these guys.
Apparently, the 82nd airborne is there or it's been deployed.
Maybe he needs that to get through here.
That's not anything that the Iranian side is not going to know, folks.
They're well aware of all these deployments.
You may have seen in recent news that both the Russians and the Chinese were fighting intelligence
support, not just targeting, but satellite imagery.
So they know and they're tracking and they have said so publicly among their IRGC spokesmen
that they're tracking everything that we're doing.
So whatever we, whatever president Trump is doing to, if this is the case here, if this
is just a ruse to fool the American people and to pretend like we're still looking
for diplomacy.
Definitely not going to work on the Iranian side.
And listen, you got to then go back, whether it's, whether it's, it was tonight, it's 7
and 45 p.m. or it's five days from now, we still have the same issue with the Iranian
side.
It's saying, listen, if you attack us, you can say goodbye to electricity after Trump's
threat, publishing a map of power plants across the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and the Gulf Coast.
And if you can see that those, there's a little blue icons all along in Qatar and Saudi
Arabia, UAE and Kuwait that shows that, that looks at, we're going to target these.
We're going to attack all of these things here and we're going to turn you guys into
night.
None of those things have changed.
All that targeting is still there.
The straight of Hormuz remains closed.
All of the conditions that existed last week are continued to be the case.
But you see with president Trump, he's, it depends on what day it is, it depends on
what time of the day it is.
That's why I have to pay so much attention to his true social because stuff can radically
change and completely contradict something else.
He says, and then we always have to go back to what's really happening on the ground.
What is happening on the ground is a lot of ground power is going in there.
There is a 10 attack fighter fighter jets for ground support, close air support.
There's a patchy attack helicopters for ground support, you're getting more ground power.
Now you're getting used to many carriers, so to speak, both with fighter jets, osprey
helicopters and other kinds of attack craft, other support ships, lots of combat power for
ground coming into the region.
I hope that president Trump doesn't just think that the Iranians are stupid.
That's a really bad thing because all those threats, all those claims and all the capability
that we had before or that they had before rather is still there.
If he strikes five days from now, seven days from now, 12 days from now, whatever it
turns out to be, I think that the boxer itself is not even supposed to be there until mid-April.
So five days is probably not going to be enough.
There's combat power on the ground right now, and I think that the USS Tripoli, I believe,
actually arrives today if I'm not mistaken.
So the boxer would be another week or 10 days beyond that in full power, steam and full
steam.
It's possible that we can say, hey, we'll launch something now because we have a number
of ground troops there at the moment.
We have the USS Tripoli with its escort ships.
Maybe somebody's thinking, we'll just do this on the fly too.
Everything seems disjointed with this.
It has been from the beginning.
Even the Pentagon deserves criticism for how they've piecemealed this stuff out.
They don't seem to think things through.
They don't seem to think about second, third order effects, which used to be a basic
tenant of what the Pentagon would teach its soldiers.
This is just not wired at all, Todd.
You see that there is disparity within the administration.
There's disparity between the U.S. and Israel.
This has all the markings of a disaster.
Let us hope that somehow, with this extra time, and I'm grateful for it every day, every
hour that we have before making such a strike, is one more chance that somehow sanity will
come through or at least sell preservation.
But still, even if that, just not striking that isn't going to solve the problem because
you still can't get that straight open.
If this five days, except the price of oil went down, right when he said that, but you
see it already started tricking back up.
If the days keep going on, and then that five days expires, and nothing's happened, there's
no negotiated deal, there's no attack, and there's the straight-of-hormous days closed, it's
going to go right back up to its upper descent.
This has bought a near-term help, but it buys time for more diplomacy and maybe more regional
allies and partners to talk into this, to try to find some way to get this down.
I certainly hope so.
We'll figure out what that's going to be.
Listen, we got, in about 15 minutes from now, we got Patrick Bob back with us today.
He's going to be talking about this Iran deadline, and what this is going to mean in a lot
of what President Trump has said, and then also later this afternoon, we have another show.
You don't want to miss this one.
This is at 3pm this afternoon with the Iranian professor Morandi from the University of
Tehran.
He's very tightly connected with the thinking of the Iranian government, and he's going
to be able to tell us where they are, so I'm really looking forward to this, I promise
you don't miss this one, because he will have all the inside for what the Iranian side
is saying after this recent back down by President Trump in this imposition of an extension
of five days on this so-called ultimatum.
Watch that.
Patrick Bob here in about 15 minutes, Professor Morandi this afternoon, we'll look forward
to seeing you again on the 10th of November's deep dive.
Daniel Davis Deep Dive
