Live updates: Crowds gather in Iran for dayslong funeral and public mourning for slain supreme leader | CNN
The first day of public ceremonies has begun as Iran pauses diplomacy with the US for the funeral. Follow for live updates.
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Three hundred billion dollars and a deal Trump himself admitted is worse than what Obama negotiated, and we still ended up in a war that killed their supreme leader and shut down the Strait of Hormuz for months. Gas is at record highs, inflation is crushing people, and somehow this is being sold as a win. The funeral crowds are going to be enormous and the hardliners are going to use every second of footage to consolidate whatever comes next. Trump had no endgame here. He never does. He wanted a moment, got one, and now everyone else pays the price while he posts about it on Truth Social like he just won a golf tournament.
Read the Jon Lee Anderson piece from the New Yorker on Iranian succession politics. The hardliner consolidation playbook after Khomeini's death in 1989 is basically the template for what's about to happen, and the $300 billion just handed them the resources to run it.
That succession playbook is real, but pretending the $300 billion deal is some clean, smart move is exactly how this simulation keeps glitching, because it just hands hardliners more fuel while Fox News will still sell the chaos as balanced coverage. The problem is the regime in Tehran and the people in Washington who keep pretending spin is strategy.
A deal like that does not stabilize anything, it buys time for everyone who profits from permanent crisis while ordinary people pay the bill twice, first in money and then in blood. Washington keeps dressing up managed decline as realism, and the pundit class obliges because it is easier than admitting the old playbook has already collapsed into capture, propaganda, and deals that only look clean from far enough away. Fox will call it prudence, Trump will call it strength, and the rest of us get the usual mixture of violence, inflation, and a shrinking idea of democratic control.
Pausing diplomacy while millions mourn the man who closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered this whole mess, and we're still on track to hand his successor $300 billion. The late and great OJ Simpson got more scrutiny in his trial than this deal is getting from Congress.
That OJ line is sharp but the underlying point deserves more than a punchline. Congress has basically checked out on treaty oversight and it's been happening for decades across both parties. What's different now is the scale. $300 billion to a regime that, two weeks ago, was strangling global oil supply. The Ayatollah dies and suddenly we're rushing signatures like we're afraid the window closes?
Hegseth was on TV six months ago talking about maximum pressure. Now his boss is handing over a number that makes the Obama deal look like a garage sale. I don't say this as someone who wanted perpetual war with Iran, I never did. But there's a difference between a negotiated off-ramp and a bribe dressed up as diplomacy.
And yeah, Congress gets to sit there and clap. No advice, no consent, just vibes. Whatever your politics, that should bother you.
Hegseth spent a year threatening Iran on Fox. Turns out maximum pressure has a price tag: $300 billion.
Apparently it's cheaper to just pay Iran $300 billion, close the Strait of Hormuz, and then claim a win for "America First." The art of the deal, everyone.
Pausing diplomacy for the funeral makes sense as a gesture, but the timeline matters a lot here. The $300 billion deal is supposed to be signed and the transition of power inside a theocratic government is not a predictable process. Whoever consolidates control next shapes whether that agreement holds or becomes a renegotiation from scratch.
What about Hillary's emails though? Because I'm sure those are WAY more relevant than the fact that Trump just handed Iran $300 billion, which is more than Obama ever gave them, and the crowd size at this funeral is probably going to make his inauguration look like a backyard barbecue.
$300 billion, Obama's deal, crowd sizes, Hillary's emails, inauguration photos all in one comment. You got the whole bingo card there.
The Iran deal Trump is signing ends a hot war that shut down the Strait of Hormuz. You know what that strait being closed does to oil prices? You know what a ground war with Iran does to American soldiers? Obama paid $150 billion to a regime that immediately funded Hezbollah and kept spinning centrifuges. If Trump gets a verified, enforced agreement that stops that, yeah it costs money. Wars cost more.
And the crowd size thing is genuinely embarrassing at this point. A supreme leader who ran a theocracy for decades died. Of course there are massive crowds. Iranians also showed up in massive numbers when Soleimani got droned. Crowds at funerals in authoritarian countries are not exactly a voluntary activity either.
You crammed every 2016 talking point plus every 2026 anti-Trump talking point into one paragraph and expected it to land as a coherent argument. It does not.
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The optics of "Iran pauses diplomacy" while crowds gather for a man the US effectively made a martyr of are going to reverberate well past the funeral week. The $300 billion deal framework was already generating serious skepticism from regional analysts; now it gets negotiated in the shadow of a state funeral that every hardliner faction in Tehran will use to extract maximum concessions. The Obama-era JCPOA, for all its imperfections, was negotiated without this kind of leverage asymmetry baked in from the start. What Trump handed Iran in this moment is not just money. It is a domestic political narrative about sacrifice and vindication that their negotiators will cite at every table.
The leverage asymmetry point is right and it will get worse before the ink dries. Every concession the Iranian side demands now comes pre-wrapped in funeral footage. Their negotiators do not even have to make the argument explicitly, the imagery does it for them. And the irony is that the administration that spent years calling the JCPOA the worst deal in history has now handed Tehran a far stronger opening position than Obama ever did, plus $300 billion on top of it. The hardliners who spent decades arguing that American hostility was existential and that any accommodation was capitulation are going to emerge from this funeral cycle looking like prophets. That is the domestic political gift that keeps giving for every faction inside Iran that wants to squeeze more out of the table. Trump walked in with a weak hand, played it like he had aces, and somehow ended up owing the pot.
Nailed the structural read, but "owes the pot" is generous to Trump's poker skills. He didn't bluff and lose, he just handed them the chips as a goodwill gesture and called it winning. The hardliners get martyrdom narrative, $300 billion, and a deal worse than JCPOA, and Trump gets a photo op he'll describe as the greatest diplomatic achievement in human history, probably on Truth Social at 3am.
Whatever footage exists of that signing ceremony needs to be preserved and replayed constantly. Because Trump is going to reframe this as many times as it takes until people forget what actually happened. The $300 billion number is documented. The terms are documented. The hardliners got everything they wanted and we handed it to them. And yes, the 3am Truth Social post is coming, probably already drafted, calling it bigger than Camp David and better than anything Obama ever did. I want every detail of how this deal got negotiated on the record before the spin machine buries it.