Trump Admits He Went to War With Iran for PR Reasons

Florida is investigating the NFL for interviewing Black coaches, a man died from a treatable toothache in ICE custody, and FEMA is in shambles less than a month from hurricane season

Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump admitted the whole Iran nuclear standoff is mostly a “public relations” exercise. Florida’s attorney general has subpoenaed the NFL for the crime of interviewing Black coaches. A man in ICE detention asked for a dentist, got ibuprofen for three weeks, and died. And FEMA is being run by a former Navy SEAL who lost a congressional primary, while the guy in charge of disaster recovery claims he can teleport.

Before we get into it: No billionaire owns this operation. No advertiser is quietly asking us to find a softer angle. No parent company has a seat at the table with the people we write about. This publication exists because readers pay for it. If you’ve been reading for free, today is a good day to change that. Consider upgrading your subscription. Independent journalism doesn’t run on goodwill.

Now, the news.

Trump Admits the Iran Nuclear Crisis Is Mostly for the Cameras

After bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, threatening further strikes, and dragging the world to the edge of a larger conflict, the president of the United States sat down with Fox News and said that recovering Iran’s enriched uranium was “more for public relations than it is for anything else.”

Trump told Fox News the U.S. has nine cameras on the bombed nuclear sites running around the clock, and that nobody has gotten close to the material. “We know exactly what’s happening,” he said. He then added that he’d still like to retrieve it. “I just feel better if I got it, actually.”

To summarize: the nuclear material is fine where it is, we’re watching it constantly, and the main reason to move it is optics. But also, we might bomb it.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Esmaeil Baghaei said enriched uranium is “as sacred to us as Iranian soil and will not be transferred anywhere under any circumstances.” Meanwhile, Trump is in Beijing telling Xi Jinping about all the great things China could do to help.

The war has strained global energy markets, driven up prices worldwide, and killed people on both sides. Somewhere in a foreign ministry, a diplomat is reading the transcript of that Fox News interview and wondering if the translation is correct. It is.

Attorney General Investigates NFL for Interviewing Black People

There are six Black head coaches in the NFL. Florida’s attorney general finds this number troublingly high.

The Rooney Rule, adopted by the NFL in 2003, requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates before hiring a head coach, general manager, or coordinator. It does not require teams to hire any of them. It just requires a conversation.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has decided this is an act of racial discrimination.

Uthmeier threatened possible enforcement actions against the league in March if it didn’t suspend the 23-year-old rule. He sent a subpoena this week demanding extensive documents, including “all diversity reports, coaching census data, or demographic surveys that reflect the race and sex of coaching staffs of the teams from 2017 to the present.”

The NFL responded to his original letter by quietly editing its website to soften the language around the rule. Uthmeier then noted that removing the old language from the website after his letter may have constituted “deceptive and unfair business practices.” Damned if you don’t, damned if you do.

The NFL defended the Rooney Rule and its practices as in line with Florida and federal law, saying the rule “does not impose any hiring quotas or mandates, and it does not license clubs to consider race or sex in making hiring decisions.

The subpoena is 23 pages long. The Rooney Rule is one sentence.

We’ve been covering the DEI rollback in the NFL, in federal agencies, in every institution that’s quietly updating its website hoping nobody notices. That’s what your subscription pays for. If you’ve been reading for free, please consider upgrading.

A Man Died of a Toothache in ICE Custody

Emmanuel Damas was 56 years old, a Haitian asylum seeker, and being held at a private detention facility in Florence, Arizona, run by a company called CoreCivic. On February 13th, he told his family he had a toothache.

He asked for a dentist. He was given ibuprofen. His face began to swell. He kept asking. He kept getting ibuprofen. On February 19th, he collapsed. He was transferred to three separate hospitals. Doctors told his family the infection from his tooth had spread to his throat and then to his lungs. He went septic, was intubated, and never regained consciousness. He died on March 2nd.

This week, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner confirmed what his family knew in March: Damas died from a severe infection that spread from an untreated tooth. The official cause of death is “necrotizing mediastinitis with neck and retropharyngeal abscess in the setting of severe dental caries and periodontal disease.”

In English: his teeth killed him slowly over three weeks, while he was in government custody asking for help.

ICE’s own report said he “declined recommendations for tooth extractions.” His family says no dentist ever actually saw him and that the recommendations came with no urgency and no follow-through.

Damas is one of 18 people who have died in ICE custody so far this year. In 2025, ICE recorded 33 deaths, a threefold increase from 2024 when 11 people died. CoreCivic renewed its contract.

FEMA Has No Leader, No Staff, and One Guy Who Claims He Can Teleport

Hurricane season starts June 1st. Here is the current state of the agency responsible for keeping Americans alive when it arrives.

FEMA has been without a Senate-confirmed administrator since January 2025. It has cycled through a series of acting officials: a man who was fired for saying the agency should continue to exist, a novelist who lasted six months, and a government IT manager known internally as “The Terminator” for her enthusiasm in cutting staff and funding.

This week, Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the agency. Hamilton was fired from FEMA a year ago for saying publicly that FEMA should not be abolished.

Gregg Phillips, the associate administrator for disaster response, has been making headlines not for disaster response but for claiming on multiple right-wing podcasts that he can teleport. He also pushed theories that Biden’s DHS conspired to assassinate Trump and that a “Chinese army” would invade the United States.

Three out of four top leadership positions at the agency remain vacant. The regions covering Texas and Louisiana have neither a regional administrator nor a deputy. Experts on emergency management recently graded the agency on disaster preparedness and gave it an F.

The good news is Gregg Phillips says he can be anywhere instantly. The bad news is teleportation isn’t real.

About Our Billionaire Owner (We Don’t Have One)

Here’s what’s happening to the press while all of this is going on.

Local newsrooms are closing. National outlets are being bought by people who play golf with the subjects of their coverage. Networks are spiking segments. Reporters are self-censoring because they’ve watched what happens to the ones who don’t.

We’ve watched it too. The difference is we don’t have a parent company, advertisers with preferred outcomes, or a board of directors with opinions about which stories are worth finishing.

What we have is a publication that people read because they want to know. That’s the whole business model. No billionaire, no broadcast license, no quiet handshakes with the people in these stories. Just readers. Just you. If you’ve been reading for free, we’re asking you to subscribe. Not as a favor. Because that’s the only way this exists.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tomorrow.

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House Democrats Launch Voter Protection Effort Ahead of Midterms. Hakeem Jeffries announced this week that House Democrats are mounting the largest voter protection effort in the history of the country, which is a remarkable thing to have to do six months before a midterm election in the United States of America. They are doing it because the Supreme Court just wiped out majority-Black congressional districts, and Republicans are planning the largest voter suppression effort in the history of the country.

New Hawaii law targets corporate influence in politics after Citizens United ruling. Hawaii signed a law this week redefining corporations in a way that bars them from spending on elections, the first serious legislative challenge to Citizens United since the Supreme Court decided in 2010 that corporations are people and money is speech. The law doesn’t take effect until 2027, which gives corporate lawyers plenty of time to sue, and the Supreme Court plenty of time to remind Hawaii how this works.

ICE releases wife of US soldier and Afghanistan veteran from detention. ICE arrested the wife of a 28-year Army veteran at her own immigration appointment, held her for weeks, and considered deporting her to a country she’s never lived in. She’s home now, fitted with a GPS ankle monitor, because the government that her husband has served for nearly three decades needed some way to make the happy ending feel like a punishment.