We need to start with a correction, and we are going to make it without flinching because that is what we do here. In our last update, we held the line on Khamenei’s death. We said we would not call it confirmed based on the word of a man who spews demonstrable bullshit like Old Faithful spews water — on schedule, under pressure, and regardless of what’s actually true. We said we would not call it confirmed simply because a compound was reduced to rubble. After all, the East Wing of the Very White House is a pile of rubble — not from enemy fire, but because everything Dicktater Don touches eventually turns to trumpshit, and because his pathological need to slap his name on every institution he can get his tiny hands on tends to leave things structurally unsound. The Trump White House renovation project is its own special category of destruction. And yet somehow, Dicktater Don and Melanomia remain very much alive and presumably still surrounded by shrimp cocktail and sycophants in Mar-a-Lardo. Rubble, it turns out, is not a death certificate.

We are going to tell you what Donald Trump said about the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and then we are going to tell you what Iran said, and then we are going to tell you what the United Nations Secretary-General said, and then we are going to let you sit with the gap between all three and draw your own conclusions.

The death toll at Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab has risen to 85. We need to say that again, slowly, because the number keeps climbing and the world keeps moving and we refuse to let that happen without stopping and making you feel the weight of it. Eighty-five people. Almost all of them young girls, between the ages of seven and twelve, according to Iranian state media, sitting in their classrooms on a Saturday morning — Saturday is the first day of the school week in Iran — when the bombs fell. Sixty-three more were injured. Workers are still clearing the rubble. The school had a name. Shajareh Tayyebeh. The girls had names. We don’t have all of them yet. We will not stop asking.

Let’s get something straight before we go any further. Donald Trump — the man who ran on ending wars, who called every previous military adventure “stupid” and “endless,” who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for conflicts he claimed to have ended, who built an entire political identity out of being the guy who doesn’t start fights — just launched “major combat operations” in Iran. He called it Operation Epic Fury. Naming their war mongering operations is the deepest thought they put into anything. He announced it on Truth Social. He told the Iranian people to “take over your government” and then immediately resumed bombing them. He told Iranian soldiers to surrender or face “certain death.” During Ramadan.