Vice President JD Vance argued during an interview with Bill Maher Friday that "America wins" even if Iran refuses to sign a deal that would end the war.

"If we don't make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed, they're still much weaker as a country," Vance said during his appeance on "Real Time with Bill Maher."

"So my attitude is America wins either way," he added.

Vance noted that President Trump tasked US negotiators with "something that frankly, nobody in 47 years of dealing with the Iranians has done, which is offer them an opportunity to fundamentally transform how they behave with the West."

"If they're willing to change, we're willing to change, too," the vice president said, adding, "If they're not willing to change, we still fundamentally have all the cards.

"I think it's a good place for us to be."

President Trump wants the judge that sentences John Bolton following his guilty plea Friday to throw the book at him.

"John Bolton, a very dumb, unbalanced, and unskilled former representative of the United States of America, just pleads guilty!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.

"He is a terrible person, a lunatic who only wanted to start trouble and wars, and who was a needless pusher of death and destruction wherever he went," the president continued. "Hopefully, he will be dealt with harshly!"

Bolton, who served as Trump's national security adviser during part of his first term, pleaded guilty Friday to a single count of hoarding national defense information while working in the White House.

Bolton, who will be sentenced in October, faces up to five years in federal prison.

Vice President JD Vance declared that "violence will be met with violence" after the US struck Iran on Friday.

"Iran signed a ceasefire agreement. We have honored it. If they have disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone," Vance posted on X. "But violence will be met with violence."

A one-way Iranian attack drone struck a Singapore-flagged ship seeking to exit the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday.

Friday afternoon, CENTCOM announced that drone storage facilities and coastal radar sites in Iran were hit by US forces in a "powerful response."

US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced Friday that American forces conducted military strikes on Iran in a "powerful response" to an Iranian drone attack on a commercial ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian drone storage facilities and coastal radar sites were hit by US warplanes in retaliation for the Thursday attack on the M/V Ever Lovely, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship.

"The unwarranted aggression against commercial shipping by Iranian forces clearly violated the ceasefire," read a statement released by CENTCOM. "Furthermore, Iran’s dangerous behavior undermined freedom of navigation as commerce increasingly flows through the vital international trade corridor."

"CENTCOM forces continue to provide safe passage coordination and support to commercial vessels transiting the strait," the statement continued. "The U.S. military remains present and vigilant to ensure all aspects of the agreement with Iran are adhered to, obeyed, and in full force and effect."

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President Trump chastised the Iranians for violating a cease-fire with the US by striking a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz — and told reporters they would "find out" soon what his administration's response would be.

"I don't like the fact that they took a shot yesterday — actually, four, we knocked down three — at a ship," Trump said in the Oval Office.

An explosive drone from the Islamic Republic struck a Singaporean cargo ship seeking to exit the strait on Thursday, halting traffic through the narrow channel close to the coast of Oman.

"Not an Allied ship, but a ship. A very expensive ship. And it was fine, but it took a little beating," he noted, before saying the Iranians "shouldn't be doing that."

Asked whether Tehran would face any consequences, he added: "You'll find out."

An eighth suspect has been arrested for allegedly plotting to attack the White House's UFC Freedom 250 event earlier this month.

Authorities apprehended Alexander Iniguez Mercado, 20, on Thursday and charged him with obstruction of justice for deleting the private messaging application Signal from his phone.

The platform had been used by other suspects charged in the plot to fly explosive drones at the White House cage fight on June 14.

An FBI special agent had called Mercado the day before and confronted him about the plan, to which Mercado allegedly denied involvement and refused to meet with authorities.

He faces up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

WASHINGTON -- President Trump has provided some detail about an apparent skirmish in the Strait of Hormuz between the US and Iran Thursday.

"We still have a fight," he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition Conference at the Washington Hilton.

"They have some capability, not much. They're not winning or anything. But they have some … They shot a drone yesterday at a big ship going into the Hormuz Strait. They shot four of them. We knocked down three of them.

"One of them -- we didn't miss it, nobody saw it coming -- and it hit a ship and did some damage. But can't do that stuff.

"But very soon ... we're going to be at $2.50 gasoline."

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump argued Friday that former reality TV villain Spencer Pratt should fight what Trump called a "rigged election" that saw Pratt miss out on the November runoff for Los Angeles mayor.

“What’s happening in California, votes still aren’t in…and it’s cheating,” Trump said. “The kid won, or he was certainly in the top two.”

“I said they rigged the election, and then you hear that a woman who nobody ever heard of is in the runoff. Not him.”

Incumbent Democratic mayor Karen Bass will face far-left City Councilwoman Nithya Raman in the general election Nov. 3 after Pratt, formerly of MTV's "The Hills," missed out on a top-two finish by 3.5 percentage points.

President Trump said Friday that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's rent freeze policies would turn neighborhoods into "ghettos and slums."

Mamdani "said he was going to do this in his campaign, but nobody thought he was serious," the president said after the city's Rent Guidelines Board approved plans Thursday night to freeze rent for two years on nearly 1 million units.

"What the mayor doesn't say is that these buildings will soon turn into ghettos and slums and that everybody will continue leaving New York," Trump predicted.

"And as this spreads throughout the country, very much like an uncontrollable form of cancer, the country itself will be taken down. It will be Third World — strictly Third World."

Trump called the freeze unfair to landlords due to "the fact that energy, supplies, real estate taxes and just about everything else has gone up."

"They're basically confiscating their property."

Israel and Lebanon signed a framework peace agreement on Friday — icing out Iran and its proxy group Hezbollah — following four days of negotiations in Washington.

"In this performance-based trilateral framework agreement, Iran is out, Hezbollah is out, and the road to peace between Israel and Lebanon is in," Israeli ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter said at a signing ceremony.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the agreement as a "first step" to returning Lebanon to its prior prosperity before Hezbollah moved in and promoted terrorism.

"The people of Lebanon have suffered tremendously now for decades as a result of outside interference in their affairs of countries trying to use the country as a launchpad for attacks, and this is not what the people of Lebanon want. That's not what they deserve," he said.

"What they deserve to have is what they once had — and of which there is recent history of — and that is a prosperous and peaceful country, a diverse country where people of different backgrounds were able to live and coexist side by side in many ways was the envy of the region and of the world," he continued.

"It will take a lot of work and some time to get back to that point, but we believe today is the first step in that journey."

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WASHINGTON — "Communism is very easy to sell, it destroys everything, but it’s very easy,” President Trump told religious conservatives at the Faith & Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority Conference. “I’ll be honest, I think I’d be the greatest Communist in history.”

Trump made the comments during an attack on New York Democratic primary winners linked to the Democratic Socialists of America who the president said "want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life."

“The problem is, after two or three years, the country is a disaster area. The country fails,” Trump said of Communism. “Always so easy to sell that first year, you’re the most popular … but you’ll start living in squalor.”

The president went on to call the rise of the far left “the most serious threat to our country since its existence."

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President Trump attacked Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on Friday, claiming she would "never win another election" unless she drops her opposition to the SAVE America Act, which would restrict mail-in voting and impose national voter ID rules.

"We have a few Republicans that are fighting it — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, you should call her and tell her to get on the ball," Trump said in a speech to the Faith & Freedom Coalition.

"She'll never win another election, I can tell you, she's got to vote."

Murkowski has cited concerns about implementing the proposed election reforms in her sparsely populated state and has fended off conservative critics before — including winning as a write-in candidate in 2010 after losing the Republican primary.

She's up for re-election in 2028.