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Good morning,

I have a folder on my phone that is a collection of images I would show someone who spent the last 10-15 years in a coma and just woke up. This is its latest addition, which looks like a screenshot from a David Lynch movie.

"Wow, I've been asleep since the end of the Obama administration. What did I miss, Carlo?"

"Here's President Donald Trump addressing a group of children from the White House portico about how he's going to annihilate Iran, next to a 7-foot-tall Easter Bunny."

"Back up... President who?"

So today is "Infrastructure Day" as our increasingly out-of-control commander-in-chief is reportedly calling it, according to this rather frightening report in Axios about how Trump has become the most hawkish voice in the White House vis a vis Iran. "The president is the most bloodthirsty, like a mad dog," one unnamed official told the outlet. "[Hegseth and Rubio] sound like the doves compared to the president."

His deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is 8 p.m. ET tonight. I'm writing this at 7 a.m. ET and stock futures are -200, so it is possible by the time this hits your inbox Trump may have TACO'd that deadline. Or maybe the TACO comes later today. Despite Trump seeming to have gone around the bend — as evidenced by his threat this morning that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”. I still find it hard to believe he's going to start bombing civilian or dual-use energy infrastructure. Not because it would be a war crime, but because it all but guarantees Iran lashes out at energy targets in the Gulf, and oil goes even higher. Trump is crazy, but he's not stupid.

But then again, who knows anymore? If the POTUS has actually gone mad with power, would it look any different than this? Would we even know? Would his tweets be any crazier than his Easter message? Would there even be anyone left to stop him from doing something truly, actually, life-alteringly insane? Tucker Carlson, who is still theoretically an ally of the president, is suggesting he might use nukes against Iran if they don't reopen Hormuz tonight. Tucker spent his most recent show urging those in the White House and Pentagon to defy such orders. And that's coming from Trump's friend! Unsettling, to say the least.

Let's game this out a bit more.

Scenario 1: Trump's maximalist, "mad king" negotiating strategy bears last-minute fruit, and we get word today that there are serious ceasefire negotiations happening in Pakistan or some other country acting as mediator, and Trump stops the clock. This would be the ideal scenario, which is what we should all be praying for.

Scenario 2: Iran remains defiant, and Trump actually does authorize a major bombing campaign on civilian infrastructure across the country tonight. Bridges, power plants, the whole nine. The IRGC responds by unleashing waves of drone strikes against energy targets in countries like Qatar and Saudi. We've been repeatedly told (lied to) that Iran's missile capabilities have been seriously degraded, but they were still able to shoot down an F-15 the other day, and they're still launching missiles at Israel, so... clearly not. And even if we took out every battery in the country, which they are now hiding underground and in mountains, they've still got drones and have shown they can use those to inflict maximal pain. If a country can direct a $10,000 Shahed into a Qatari LNG facility and take 20% of the world's natural gas offline in an instant, can you really say that country is "losing" the war?

In this scenario, crude goes to $150, we've got $5 gas by the end of the month, Trump's approval scrapes the 20s, and then the question becomes: Does the president just pack it up and go home, declaring some kind of pyrrhic victory after decimating a country of 90M people? Now Hormuz is tolled, the Iranian people hate us, the IRGC reconstitutes, rushes for a bomb and a few years from now we have a North Korea in the Middle East. Think about the fact that this might be the best-case scenario for how this fiasco ends, and you realize how badly Trump stepped in it by launching this war. Trump's Waterloo would be putting a positive spin on it.

Scenario 3: This is where I would put my money if I were a betting man. Trump authorizes a single strike on a symbolic target, like an old bridge or decommissioned power plant, to prove he “means business.” Iran sends a drone or two into some oil refinery in retaliation, and it stays more or less status quo. The fighting is no closer to an end.

Meanwhile, we all just sit back and watch this war that literally no one asked for continue in perpetuity. What will the president tweet? Will it make line go up or down? Congress is still on vacation, lol. JD Vance is in Hungary, campaigning for a literal Putin cut-out operating within NATO's borders. And we wonder why the Europeans hate us now? The American people have been rendered compliant from a steady dopamine drip of social media, weed, porn and gambling, so they're no longer a threat... if they ever were. The president's two failsons are making money from their investment in a company that lets you wager on whether American soldiers shot down in Iran will live or die, while his unelected son-in-law and real-estate buddy are in charge of making peace while lining their own pockets. The president himself is ripping the copper out of the walls of the White House on his way out the door.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are fighting over which streamers are "OK” talk to.

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Carlo Versano is Newsweek's Director of Politics and Culture. He has in-depth knowledge and experience covering a range of topics and stories over a 20-year career in the news business. Carlo joined Newsweek in 2024 after a stint at The Messenger. Before that, he was an Emmy-winning producer at NBC News. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the New School. You can get in touch with Carlo by emailing [email protected].

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By Tom O'Connor and Frances Mao

Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel says the country will fight back with a guerrilla-style campaign if the U.S. launches a military attack, warning Washington that any operation would “result in immense losses” for both countries. 

The Cuban leader issued the message in an exclusive interview with Newsweek in Havana on Friday - his first with a U.S. news outlet since 2023 - in response to President Donald Trump’s threats to “take” the communist island nation just 90 miles from Florida. 

On Monday, while covering the Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn, I asked First Lady Melania Trump what she thought about the Iran war. She chose not to respond directly and instead simply said, “thank you.”

After that brief interaction, I headed to the briefing room to cover President Donald Trump’s news conference on the Iran war. It was the most packed I’ve ever seen it. Honestly, it felt like a fire hazard.

Both aisles were jammed with reporters. I saw journalists jumping over seats, and once every seated and standing spots were taken, the room turned hot in every sense of the word.

At one point, some reporters got into an argument with another journalist who did not have a permanent seat but pushed his way to the front, despite others waiting there for hours to secure a closer standing space.

I am assigned a seat, but it was still a challenge to get to it. After a few acrobatic moves, I made it and waited for the president to arrive and take questions.

I tried to ask a question, but he did not call on anyone in our row.

Towards the end of the news conference, Trump expressed disappointment with NATO and called out South Korea, Japan, and Australia.

As he exited, I shouted, “So which are our biggest allies?” but did not get a response.

If you ever wondered about the “glamor” involved in being a White House reporter, yesterday was a good example of what it’s really like.

While the world watches Artemis and holds its breath over Iran, I've been tracking two stories that look unrelated but are, in essence, the same story.

Last week, the Associated Press announced another round of cuts. It's the second restructuring in six months. The reason was familiar: newspapers are gone, major chains like Gannett and McClatchy walked away. Now the AP is pivoting toward what customers actually want. Which turns out to be AI-driven information.

But here's what scares me: AI-powered information filters are about to make that entire pivot meaningless.

Google's new AI Overviews sit at the top of search results, formatted like gospel truth. But they're wrong roughly one out of every ten times. With five trillion searches a year, that's tens of millions of false answers per hour. When the system insists Hulk Hogan isn't dead while its own linked sources say otherwise, something fundamental breaks.

Here's the brutal irony: those AI systems are citing our reporting. They're pulling from journalism we paid reporters to produce, repacking it with false confidence, and giving readers no reason to click through to the original story. But there's something darker. Once people get used to this, there's no going back.

“Kim Jong Un used to call Joe Biden a mentally retarded person.”

— President Trump reflecting on his predecessor.

The Mooch reveals all. The financier-turned White House Communications Director-turned MAGA foe tells Carlo what Trump's actually thinking, and why he's possibly the worst person to be President of the United States.

Watch the newest episode here. ⬅

Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].