US President Donald Trump has formally notified lawmakers that the country is back at war with Iran, according to an official notification sent to Congress over the weekend.

In the letter dated July 10 and obtained by Politico, Trump stated that airstrikes beginning on July 7 constituted “military actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and US interests both at home and abroad.”

The notification triggers a new 60-day statutory window under which the US administration can utilize military force in the region without prior congressional approval.

The conflict, which has repeatedly paused and restarted over control of the Strait of Hormuz—a crucial chokepoint for global energy supplies—has become a persistent challenge for the Trump administration.

Trump has expressed frustration over the failure to secure a peace agreement with Iran, while congressional Republicans remain concerned about being blamed for rising fuel prices ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

On Monday, Trump intensified military pressure on Tehran, declaring that the US would reimpose a blockade on the region, seize control of the Strait of Hormuz, and levy fees on transiting vessels.

Ceasefire process officially ends

The notification to Congress follows Trump’s announcement that a two-month-old ceasefire with Iran has officially ended.

The ceasefire, originally declared in April, had been fragile from the outset due to reciprocal attacks by both nations. Despite the friction, the Trump administration had previously maintained that a full-scale war had not resumed.

Officials from US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that US forces have struck more than 300 Iranian military targets over the past week in retaliation for Tehran’s hostile actions in the Strait of Hormuz.

On Monday, CENTCOM released a statement confirming that US forces had conducted additional airstrikes against Iran “at the direction of the Commander-in-Chief.”

“These strikes will continue to impose heavy costs on Iranian forces, degrading their capability to attack innocent civilians and commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz,” the statement read.

War powers debate

Trump had previously notified Congress that the war, which began in February, had “ended” in May, thereby resetting the 60-day statutory clock that would otherwise require the cessation of military operations without congressional authorization.

With the April ceasefire intended to run indefinitely, the White House argued that the timeline mandated by the War Powers Act had been paused.

However, anti-war lawmakers in Congress challenged this interpretation. They argued that the government was misapplying the law, noting that even when major combat operations subsided, the US Navy maintained its blockade to exert pressure on Tehran.

The new notification complicates ongoing efforts within Congress to limit military action against Iran. Last month, the Senate passed a symbolic resolution calling for an end to the hostilities, signaling waning support for Trump’s military campaign against Tehran.

The resolution, which passed 50 to 48 after four Republican senators voted with Democrats, sought to make congressional approval a requirement for continued military operations.

A similar measure had previously passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 215 to 208, also drawing the support of four Republicans.

The legislative impact of these measures remains limited, however, as joint resolutions are not sent to the president for signature, and any bill seeking to restrict executive war powers would face a certain White House veto.

In his letter to Congress, Trump emphasized that US military forces remain deployed to counter threats against allies.

“United States Armed Forces remain postured to take additional steps, as necessary and appropriate, to address further threats or attacks against the United States, its allies, or its partners, and to ensure that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran ceases to pose a threat to the United States and its partners,” Trump wrote.

Thomas Karat, behavior analyst

The senator died Saturday night of an aortic dissection, at seventy-one, in the middle of a campaign for a fifth term. His communications director cited the medical examiner’s preliminary finding: a rupture in the body’s largest artery, the consequence of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The tributes arrived within hours. Trump called him a true American patriot. Volodymyr Zelensky, who had met him twice in the preceding week, called him a friend who was there when it was needed most. Mark Rutte and Benjamin Netanyahu sent their own. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said there were no words to describe Graham’s impact on the foreign and domestic policy of the United States.

There are words. The obituaries have chosen the wrong ones, and in doing so they have skipped the only question worth asking about a man like this. Not whether he was sincere in his convictions — he was, exhaustingly so — but how a senator whose reflexive answer to every foreign crisis was force spent twenty-three years being handed the committee seats, the airtime, and the ear of four presidents that let him act on it. Graham was not an aberration the system tolerated. He was a product the system manufactured, promoted, and kept in stock because he was useful.

Consider the shape of the career. In March 2003, as the bombs fell on Baghdad, Graham told the country that past disagreements should give way to a shared commitment to see the effort through. The war he blessed that day killed more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians by the most conservative direct-death counts, birthed the insurgency that became ISIS, and left the country a wreck. He drew no lesson from it. When Libya was broken open in 2011 and left to its warlords, he had backed the intervention. When Syria was pulled apart, he had wanted deeper involvement. Across two decades, the country would be devastated, and Graham’s response to each devastation was to locate the next one.

By February of this year the next one was Iran. On the twenty-sixth, under his own Senate letterhead, Graham published an essay that reads now like a confession left in plain sight. Iran, he wrote, was facing a Berlin Wall moment. The regime was at its weakest point since 1979, and his ultimate hope was that regime change would be achieved. He described the October 7 attacks, in his own phrasing — as a silver lining, because the Israeli campaign that followed had degraded Iran’s military. He praised Trump for pursuing, in his words, peace, not war, in the same paragraphs that celebrated a bombing campaign already under way. The strikes had a name: Operation Midnight Hammer. Graham called it the largest opportunity for peace and prosperity in the Middle East in over a thousand years.

He said the quiet part in Tel Aviv, to reporters, on February 16, less than two weeks before the strikes began. The United States was on the verge of eliminating the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the region. On Fox News, days into the war, he offered the ledger in its rawest form: when the regime goes down, he said, there would be a new Middle East, and the United States would make a tremendous amount of money. Venezuela and Iran held nearly a third of the world’s known oil reserves, he noted, and the point of the exercise was a partnership with those reserves. Regime change as a real-estate transaction. He had made the trip to Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia the week before to reaffirm, he wrote, that all of it was attainable and would be extremely beneficial to the United States. Weeks earlier he had met with Mossad, telling reporters they would tell him things his own government would not.

None of this cost him anything. That is the part the eulogies cannot hold in view, because to hold it in view is to indict the institutions doing the eulogizing. A senator who spent a career being wrong about the consequences of American force — wrong about Iraq, wrong about Libya, wrong about what would follow the fall of every regime he wanted to fall — was never demoted for it. He was promoted. The record of his committee assignments tells the story in the driest possible language. For years he sat on the Armed Services Committee, from which he lectured the Senate that its love for the troops bought nothing, that only appropriations did, that a colleague worried about the budget was out of touch with the world. By the time of his death he chaired the Budget Committee and sat on Appropriations — the panels that write the numbers and bless the spending. The man who wanted every war was placed, again and again, on the committees that pay for them.

Follow the money and the shape sharpens further. Graham’s donors, across a career documented in Federal Election Commission filings, clustered where his positions pointed. The defense contractors — the makers of the aircraft, the missiles, the systems — routed money to his committees and his leadership PACs. The specific career totals sit behind a paywall that blocks automated verification, and so no single figure belongs in this account. But the pattern needs no exact number to be legible. A senator who votes for every weapons system, who calls insufficient defense spending an emergency, who treats the reduction of the military budget as a moral failure, is a senator worth funding for the people who build the weapons. The contributions were not a bribe. They did not need to be. They were an investment in a man who already believed, and who sat where belief could be converted into contracts.

The media completed the machine. Graham was a fixture of the Sunday shows and the cable green rooms for a reason that had nothing to do with wisdom and everything to do with format. He was quotable, available, and reliably hawkish, which made him the perfect guest for programs that reward certainty over accuracy and confrontation over reflection. The pipeline ran in both directions. The airtime made him a national figure, and being a national figure got him more airtime, and the whole apparatus rewarded the escalation it claimed only to be covering. When he called for bombing Iran regardless of Iran’s involvement in a given attack, and told Israel to finish the job, the remarks drew condemnation abroad and bookings at home. The market for a war hawk was deep, and he supplied it.

What made Graham durable was that his convictions never had to survive an election of ideas, only the tolerance of the institutions that housed them. He denounced Trump in 2015 as a race-baiting xenophobic bigot and a jackass, and by his second term was among the president’s most consistent defenders, having discovered that proximity to power mattered more than the content of the man wielding it. The pitch that helped start this year’s war was delivered, according to reporting on the strikes, over rounds of golf. Iran was a spoiler for everything Trump wanted, Graham told him; collapse the regime and it would be Berlin Wall stuff. The president was persuaded. The bombs fell. And when a reporter asked Graham what the plan was for the day after — the question that Iraq should have burned into every hawk in Washington — he answered that it was not his job to know. The future of Iran, he said, was for the Iranian people to determine. He had wanted the war. The consequences belonged to someone else.

That was always the arrangement. The wars were his to advocate and never his to own. He would appear on the morning shows to demand them, sit on the committees to fund them, take the money from the firms that profited from them, and when they curdled into the next disaster he would be on television again, demanding the next one, his authority somehow enhanced rather than diminished by the wreckage behind him. This is not the biography of an outlier. It is the biography of an incentive structure, wearing a man’s face.

He died with the seat already in motion. Within hours, before any burial, the reporting had turned to the scramble to replace him, to the governor who will name a temporary successor, to what his absence means for a Republican majority counting every vote. Trump told NBC he already had someone in mind. The machine that made Lindsey Graham did not pause to mourn him. It began, immediately, to fill the vacancy — because the position he occupied was never really about the man. It was about keeping the seat filled by someone who would say what he said. There is no shortage of applicants. That is the dread the eulogies are built to keep you from feeling. He is gone, and nothing that produced him has changed.

***

Thomas Karat has spent a career in multinational technology corporations and is a behavior analyst holding a Master’s in Science and Communication from Manchester Metropolitan University. His work focuses on the psychology of language in power dynamics, and his graduate thesis examined linguistic deception markers in high-stakes business negotiations. He hosts a YT podcast, SaltCubeAnalytics, and publishes at karat.substack.com

US President Donald Trump’s financial disclosures released last week reveal that he has invested millions of dollars in approximately a dozen companies, including weapons manufacturers and defense contractors, according to a news analysis by Responsible Statecraft. The analysis shows that Trump, through investment firms representing him, acquired shares in defense sector companies valued at a total of between $9.7 million and $24.3 million.

The companies receiving investment included Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.

According to the financial disclosures, the investment firms managing Trump’s assets invested between $1.6 million and $3.9 million in the data analytics and artificial intelligence company Palantir.

The analysis noted that Palantir developed the AI-powered Maven Smart System, which is utilized in US military operations in the war with Iran. The same analysis also claimed that the company contributed to the development of software named “Big Daddy,” which is used in Israeli military operations in Gaza.

Trump’s portfolio also includes shares in Boeing. The analysis stated that Boeing sold F-15 fighter jets valued at $8.6 billion to Israel less than three months before Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated their joint war against Iran.

According to the financial disclosures, Trump also invested in GE Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and RTX, the manufacturer of Tomahawk missiles.

The analysis wrote that weapons produced by these companies were heavily used in the war with Iran, including Tomahawk missiles used in a US Air Force strike on a primary school in the Iranian city of Minab. The report stated that at least 168 children lost their lives in this attack.

According to Responsible Statecraft, the majority of these companies received new contracts from the Pentagon aimed at replenishing US missile stockpiles depleted during the war with Iran.

RTX signed a $373 million contract for 23 Standard Missile-3 IB interceptor missiles, while Lockheed Martin was reported to have secured a $35 billion contract intended to quadruple its production of the THAAD missile defense system.

The financial disclosures showed that Trump’s investment firms also invested in shares of Kratos Defense, Honeywell, Howmet Aerospace, L3Harris, and TransDigm.

Responsible Statecraft noted that the shares of these companies gained significant value within a year of Trump returning to office. According to the analysis, in 2025, Palantir shares rose by 135%, Kratos shares by 188%, GE Aerospace shares by 84%, and RTX shares by 61%.

In April, Trump posted on Truth Social, stating: “Palantir Technologies has proven to have very powerful capabilities and equipment on the battlefield. Ask our enemies!” Following the post, the company’s shares reportedly rose by approximately 3% within a few minutes.

Financial records showed that Trump generated more than $2 billion in income in 2025. Responsible Statecraft wrote that this amount is “unprecedented” for a sitting US president.

According to the report, the majority of this income was derived from investments linked to cryptocurrency companies such as World Liberty Financial and Binance. Trump reportedly earned hundreds of millions of dollars from “memecoins” launched through these companies, though these crypto assets later suffered sharp declines in value, resulting in losses for numerous investors.

The analysis stated that Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE National Security Advisor and brother of the UAE President and Foreign Minister, invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial and $2 billion in Binance. Trump subsequently approved the export of advanced AI chips to the UAE, a decision that the analysis indicated created the impression of being linked to the crypto investments.

According to the analysis, Donald Trump Jr. is also connected to companies operating in the unmanned aerial vehicle and defense technology sectors. Trump Jr. is a major shareholder and advisory board member at Unusual Machines, which manufactures drone components, while his investment firm also holds stakes in Powerus and Vulcan Elements, both of which hold Pentagon contracts.

Trump Jr. serves on the board of Powerus, which markets drone systems used to intercept Iranian missiles to Gulf countries, and Eric Trump is reported to hold a financial interest in the same company.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, evaluated the situation, saying: “These countries are under great pressure to buy from the president’s sons. In this way, the president will do what they want.”

When asked last year about potential conflicts of interest arising from Trump’s business activities, White House Spokesperson Anna Kelly responded: “There are no conflicts of interest.” Trump also acknowledged the existence of conflicts of interest in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, but argued they were not important, saying: “I realized that nobody cares.”