Trump Sending Troops to the Gulf Despite Claiming He Wants a Deal

If Donald Trump says he’s ready for peace with Iran, why is the Pentagon planning to deploy thousands of troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East?

The Department of Defense is plotting to deploy 3,000 members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, two U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal. The orders are expected to be signed Tuesday afternoon.

While the decision to put boots on the ground has not been made, the officials told the Journal, deploying the elite, rapid-response paratrooper division does expand the range of options Trump can take in Iran. The decision comes just days after Trump announced that the U.S had held “productive talks” with Iranian officials moving closer to a “complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East, with a five-day pause on strikes against energy infrastructure.

Iranian officials have denied that the country is in talks with the United States, and some have speculated Trump’s announcement was merely an attempt at market manipulation. At the same time, Israel launched fresh attacks on Tehran Monday despite Trump’s gesture at peace.

The 82nd Airborne Division, comprising up to 5,000 soldiers, specializes in missions that include parachute assault, reinforcing U.S. embassies, and enabling emergency evacuations. Earlier this month, the U.S. Army spontaneously canceled a training exercise for the elite division, sparking concerns that they would be deployed to the Middle East. It seems now that those concerns were well-founded.

President Trump took questions after Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as homeland security secretary on Tuesday, and dropped a strange detail about the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Iran.

After a journalist asked Trump why he would bother trying to negotiate with Iran if, as the president has claimed, he doesn’t trust their leadership, Trump replied:

“Because they’re going to make a deal. They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually. They gave us a present. And the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. And I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.… That meant one thing to me—we’re dealing with the right people.”

It is simultaneously funny and depressing to hear that Iranian leaders have realized they can essentially just bribe Trump with an expensive gift. It’s a similar strategy to that recently employed by María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who presented her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in January, sparking allegations that she was trying to curry favor with the president. (Trump was thrilled by the gift but later snubbed Machado anyway.)

Reporters prodded Trump about what the present was. The president wouldn’t say exactly but hinted that it “was oil and gas related” and “related to the flow, and to the Strait [of Hormuz].” Perhaps an agreement giving Trump and his cronies exclusive access to an oil field?

Negotiations to end the war have gotten off to a rocky start. After Trump claimed on Monday that Iran and the U.S. had held “productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities,” Iranian officials came out and said the talks had never happened.

Despite the fact that U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran are very much ongoing, as is Iranian retaliation, Trump also claimed in his remarks that the “war has been won” and “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”

The Trump administration suffered another loss in court after a federal judge ordered them to bring a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient they deported to Mexico while she was in the process of applying for lawful permanent residency.

Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1998 when she was 15 years old and received DACA protection in 2013. Last month, the Sacramento, California, resident showed up at an immigration hearing with her 22-year-old U.S. citizen daughter, only to be greeted by federal agents, detained, and deported.

But on Monday, U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins declared Juarez’s deportation unlawful and demanded that the Trump administration return her to the United States by March 30, calling it a “flagrant violation of the regulatory protections afforded to her under DACA.”

“It is difficult to argue that Petitioner’s removal constitutes anything less than an ‘extreme circumstance,’” Coggins wrote in her order. “Less than 24 hours after Petitioner’s good faith appearance to pursue lawful permanent resident status in this country — she was removed to a nation where she had not lived in over 27 years pursuant to an order purportedly entered against her when she was fifteen years old.”

The Justice Department claims that Juarez’s DACA status did not exclude her from deportation, while the Department of Homeland Security has yet to publicly comment. In the past, DHS has tried to argue that DACA status is not protection from deportation, even though the status of the program is tied up in court.

President Trump currently has a negative approval rating with male voters as the demographic groups he leaned on for support continue to abandon him.

CNN’s Harry Enten broke down recent polling on air Tuesday.

“Donald Trump and Republicans won in 2024 because of support from male voters … and male voters are abandoning Donald Trump,” Enten said. “In November of 2024, he beat Kamala Harris among them by 13 points. By 13 points. Look at where he is now on his net approval rating. Down he goes! It’s a 20-point shift away from Donald Trump. He is now seven points underwater, at this particular point, among men. I think it is very difficult for Republicans to do well in this midterm cycle. If Donald Trump is underwater with men.

“Yikes! Yikes, yikes, yikes! Men under the age of [45] on Trump. He won them in 2024 by five points. Look where he is now.… Down we go to negative 19 points. That’s nearly a 25-point switcheroo against the president of the United States when it comes to men under the age of 45,” Enten continued. “Those men that had switched their allegiances over to the Republican Party are seeing what the president is doing. They don’t like what the President is doing, and they are very much soured on the president of the United States, men under the age of 45.”

The primary catalyst for this reversal is of course the economy.

“We’ve spoken about it over and over and over again. The cost of living. It’s inflation. In October 2024 … Trump was trusted more than Kamala Harris by 10 points on this issue. Now we’ve got a 40-point switcheroo in the other direction,” Enten said. “His net approval rating on the cost of living among men is underwater by 30 percentage points.”

This poll is absolutely brutal, and it isn’t the only one. Last month, centrist think tank Third Way found that only 38 percent of 1,462 men between the ages of 18 and 29 approve of the first year of Trump’s second term. Fifty-eight percent say Trump has “negatively impacted their finances.” Sixty-five percent are struggling to pay the bills. And 61 percent believe that the president isn’t carrying out his campaign promises.

Trump’s decisions as president—the worldwide tariffs, the war on Iran, the lack of action on housing and affordability—are negatively impacting the same issues he campaigned on, and now the people who voted for him seem to be having some regrets. The upcoming midterm elections will be a rude awakening.

Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration Tuesday, accusing it of withholding information related to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were shot by federal officers in Minnesota earlier this year.

The lawsuit claims federal authorities “took exclusive control of evidence,” and refused state and local authorities basic information following both killings, as well as the non-fatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis.

“Instead of sharing information, federal authorities took exclusive possession of evidence that had been collected, and they denied Minnesota investigators access to key information,” the lawsuit reads. The state argues this failure to cooperate violates its “responsibility to protect against and address violence within its borders, including by prosecuting homicides, attempted homicides, and assaults.”

All three shootings were part of Operation Metro Surge, the destructive incursion of more than 3,000 armed federal immigration officers into Minnesota to arrest, detain, and and take down anyone who got in their way. The Department of Homeland Security said it arrested more than 4,000 undocumented people between December 2025 and February 2026, in what it called what as “the largest DHS operation ever.” It cost Minneapolis more than $200 million in damages.

“The Surge created widespread fear among Minnesota residents, both citizens and noncitizens. It caused hundreds of millions of dollars in economic harm. And it flooded Minnesota’s federal courts with lawsuits challenging the unlawful detentions that resulted from the operation,” the plaintiffs, which include Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, wrote.

Minnesota officials previously accused federal officers of non-cooperation after the DHS took over the investigation into Good’s killing, a decision that was defended by outgoing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem is listed as a defendant in the lawsuit alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The state urges cooperation in criminal investigations is essential not only to justice, but a functioning judicial system.

“At stake is not only Plaintiffs’ access to evidence central to these shootings but also a fundamental principle of our constitutional system: that the States retain the sovereign authority—and responsibility—to investigate crimes committed within their borders.”

This story has been updated.