Did Trump Kick Off a Global Food Crisis With Iran War?

The global trade crisis sparked by Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran may soon become a global food crisis, as farmers facing surging fertilizer prices warn they won’t be able to plant their crops, according to a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Fertilizer prices are rising due to the halt of trade through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been essentially closed since the United States and Israel launched their first wave of attacks on February 28. This abrupt stoppage comes as farmers in the northern hemisphere would typically order fertilizer to arrive next month for the upcoming planting season.

The Trump administration has pushed to resume the flow of energy through the Persian Gulf, but oil wasn’t the only export trapped at sea. One-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf countries are responsible for producing 13 percent of the world’s fertilizer exports.

Another commodity trapped at the Strait of Hormuz is liquefied natural gas, which is used in the production of nitrogen fertilizers. Twenty percent of all natural gas exports travel through the Persian Gulf’s essential passageway. As a result, the benchmark price of urea, the most common variety of nitrogen fertilizer, surged 30 percent in the last month.

The U.S. produces three-quarters of the fertilizer it consumes, but farmers are concerned about the already record-high prices of materials, which could continue to climb.

In a letter sent to President Donald Trump Monday, the American Farm Bureau Federation warned that the shock to the fertilizer supply chain would drive prices even higher.

“Not only is this a threat to our food security—and by extension our national security—such a production shock could contribute to inflationary pressures across the U.S. economy,” wrote AFBF President Zippy Duvall.

Economists and fertilizer experts anticipate that the disruptions to global trade will further drive up inflation, and the South Carolina Farm Bureau publicly fretted that farmers “are not going to be able to finance planting their crop.”

It appears that Trump’s frivolous military campaign in Iran is threatening to upend the entire northern hemisphere’s food system. That not only includes the United States but also Mexico, Canada, and the European Union, which are the largest agricultural exporters to the United States.

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for much longer, it could threaten the entire global agriculture cycle. Smaller agrarian countries that do not produce their own fertilizer would be the first to see widespread crop failures.

The Senate passed a landmark housing bill Thursday with a rare show of bipartisan support, but one Democrat still voted “no.”

Brian Schatz of Hawaii was the lone Democrat to vote against the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which would create incentives to build new homes, launch a program to turn abandoned buildings into housing, and ban Wall Street from purchasing single-family homes, among other long overdue reforms.

Co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Tim Scott, it passed 89–10, with all of the “no” votes coming from Republicans except Schatz. Why? Schatz gave a clue that he wasn’t happy with the bill Wednesday, claiming on the Senate floor that “there is a problem” with the bill.

“It was written in such a way that it was trying to capture the hedge fund problem, but they wrote it wrong,” Schatz said, citing a provision in the bill that requires large institutional investors to sell their rental properties to families after seven years. He claimed that the legislation defines such investors as for-profit organizations that own ​​over 350 single-family homes, not just hedge funds.

Warren disagreed, and said Schatz was mischaracterizing the kind of businesses that own more than 350 homes, and that they could still build as much as they want.

“Private equity can build as many multi-family homes as they want, as many apartment buildings as they want, and as many single-family buildings as they want,” the Massachusetts senator told HuffPost. “They can suck up all of the tax benefits that they’re currently entitled to, with the one exception that after seven years of benefits, private equity has to take those single-family homes and make them available for families to buy.”

Evidently Schatz’s concerns were enough to get him to vote against the bill, which now heads to the House with its narrow Republican majority. The fact that so many Republicans supported it in the Senate is a good sign, but it still faces an uncertain future in the House and with President Trump, who reportedly told Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a [bleep] about housing” earlier this week. But either way, Schatz appears to be in a very small minority allied with Wall Street, one even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent isn’t a part of.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is demanding that ABC News retract reporting on a potential Iranian retaliatory attack on California because it was based on an “unverified” tip—even though the FBI alerted law enforcement to it in the first place.

“This post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people,” Leavitt wrote on X on Thursday. “They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip. The email even states the tip was based on *unverified* intelligence. Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story! WHY? TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.”

But if the tip was as inconsequential and unreliable as Leavitt claims it to be, why did the FBI even pass it on in the first place?

“We recently acquired information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” the FBI’s announcement read. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”

The White House is taking the current Middle East conflict very seriously.

Rather than write a formal address about the president’s decision to start a war with Iran, White House staffers spent time and resources crafting a Wii Sports–themed social media video about “Operation Epic Fury.”

The discordant 52-second project stitches together the 2006 Nintendo title with drone footage from the battlefield, turning real-world violence into a video game. The montage includes a clip of Wii Sport’s golf buttressed by a drone strike labeled “hole in one,” and a baseball sequence adjoined to an explosion in Iran that features the words “out of the park,” all while the game’s iconic soundtrack rings in the background.

So far, seven U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. About 140 American soldiers have also been injured. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south—an attack that a U.S. assessment report found was “likely” the fault of American forces.

And yet the Wii Sports video is far from the first instance in which the White House has made an open mockery of the human death toll of the war, which was not approved by Congress, the sole government branch with the constitutional authority to do so.

The administration published another one of its disturbing jokes Wednesday evening, cobbling a bowling animation sequence out of recent footage of the war. In it, an AI-generated crowd of angry, gun-toting bowling pins hold up a sign reading, “We won’t stop making nuclear weapons.” They’re then placed on a bowling alley with a sign above them reading “Iranian Regime Officials.”

“Here comes the hit from the USA,” sounds an announcer as a red, white, and blue bowling ball knocks them down.

The video then descends into a rapid-fire sequence of exploding buildings while a remix of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” plays.

Last week, the White House used footage from Call of Duty in another propagandistic piece about the Iran war, overlaying real clips of destroyed targets with the games’ HUD layout—and its XP gains. In one shot, real footage of a U.S. drone attack on a truck is labeled “+100.” That was apparently a step too far, even for the White House, which has since deleted the video.

A former Department of Homeland Security spokesperson was reportedly directly involved in awarding federal funds that ended up with her husband’s company, in the latest installment of the $220 million scandal that got Kristi Noem fired.

Tricia McLaughlin, who served as the public face for DHS’s brutal immigration crackdown, had significant involvement in the procurement process, and was included on email chains about vendor selection, a current DHS official told The Daily Wire.  

McLaughlin told the outlet that she had been among a group of officials who heard presentations in February from just three companies who were invited to bid. It’s not clear which companies presented bids. 

This reporting directly contradicts Noem’s testimony to Congress earlier this month, when she claimed the contract “went out to a competitive bid and career officials at the department chose who would do those advertising commercials.” It appears that’s just one of many lies Noem told under oath. 

Two companies were awarded massive federal contracts, including a $143 million contract to Safe America Media LLC, a company that had incorporated a little over a week earlier. McLaughlin told The Daily Wire that Safe America Media was selected because the men who ran it, veteran GOP media operative Mike McElwain and his top ad maker, Patrick McCarthy, were “some of the best in the business, they’ve had a storied, illustrious career.”

Safe America Media LLC then subcontracted Strategy Group, a media company headed by Benjamin Yoho, McLaughlin’s husband. His company received a total of $226,137 for five film shoots, 45 video, and six radio ad spots.

Strategy Group’s ties to Noem’s inner circle don’t stop there. The outgoing secretary was reportedly put in touch with the agency by her alleged paramour and chief adviser, Corey Lewandowski. And the company is now working on the congressional campaign of former ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan, the 28-year-old woman Noem handpicked to oversee ICE’s billion-dollar budget.

Earlier this week, Democratic lawmakers launched an investigation into how exactly the multimillion-dollar ad campaign contracts were awarded, and how that money ended up with an official’s spouse.