Since yesterday I’ve been checking the news periodically to see what was going on with the One Big Ugly Bill in the Senate. I held on to faint hope that the thing would stall forever. But I just saw a news bulletin saying that it passed. Now it’s off for another messy fight in the House.

One of the terrible ironies of this bill is that while it will do a lot of damage to the nation and its citizens, it likely will end up hurting the GOP also. Some Republican senators are smart enough to know that, which probably is why a few dragged their feet. House Republicans are, um, more cognitively challenged, however.

According to this really excellent article about the bill in the Atlantic, “Each year, the legislation would kill 51,000 Americans, researchers at Yale have estimated.” However, “two in three Americans say they have heard little or nothing about it.” This is why so many voters make bad choices; they don’t know what the bleep is going on.

Speaking of killing people, today is the end of the USAID program. It is totally terminated. By closing it, the Trump Administration is responsible for a lot of deaths already. See In Sudan, where children clung to life, doctors say USAID cuts have been fatal.

When U.S.-supported soup kitchens were forced to close, babies starved quietly, their mothers said, while older siblings died begging for food. Funding stoppages meant that critical medical supplies were never delivered, doctors said. The lack of U.S.-funded disease response teams has made it harder to contain cholera outbreaks, which are claiming the lives of those already weakened by hunger.

The food that could have saved those babies has been sitting in storage, slowly spoiling. And CNN reports, Rubio hails end of USAID as study says its elimination could contribute to 14 million deaths in next 5 years

Today former presidents Bush and Obama issued videos critical of the agency’s closing. You could have spoken up sooner, guys, Nobody was stopping you.

There’s been some guffawing — although not nearly enough — about Donald Trump’s not knowing when the U.S. Civil War ended. But if you listen to what he said, that’s not the only thing he’s ignorant about.

Trump: “If you look at the end of the Civil War — the 1800s, it was a very turbulent time. If you take the end day — was it 1869? Or whatever.” pic.twitter.com/7DaJhePIzD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 27, 2025

If you listen to this, notice that Trump refers to birthright citizenship as a “case.” Does he think birthright citizenship came about because of a court ruling? He doesn’t know the 14th Amendment, obviously, which doesn’t say bleep about the babies of slaves. And if Joe Biden had said something this stupid, he’d have been locked up in an Old Folks’ Home within an hour. But Trump gets a pass. I’d also like someone to look into his theory that the drug cartels are using birthright citizenship to somehow plant their people among us. I have doubts.

I understand the Senate is working overtime to salvage enough of the One Big Ugly Bill to pass it and get it to the House. Here’s a Politico article about stuff that’s changed over the past several hours. My favorite is that “Whaling boat captains in Alaska will be able to deduct more for whale-hunting-related expenses, up to $50,000 from the current $10,000.” Is this to get Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote? Commercial whaling is illegal, btw, but the Inupiat people still hunt whales for food and other resources. But at this point the 900-plus-page bill has got to be such a thrown together mess I doubt anyone knows what’s in it.

TPM reports that the Senate has put some of the stuff the Parliamentarian took out back into the bill, but with revisions. The plan to stop states from taxing Medicaid providers (and then give the taxes back to the states as state benefits, earning more federal dollars) is back in, but implementation is delayed until 2028. So the rural hospitals won’t close until Trump is out of office, I guess.

The fallout from Zohran Mamdani’s first-round win in the Dem NYC mayoral primary continues. Typically, the Dem establishment, which always goes on about unity, is keeping Mamdani and his supporters at arm’s length. As far as I can find out, neither of New York’s senators has endorsed Mamdani. See TPM, The Political World’s Five-Alarm Mamdani Meltdown.

See also Zohran Mamdani’s Win Is the Beginning of the End of the Old Democratic Party by Hamilton Nolan in In These Times. I don’t know if he’s right about the beginning of the end, but I got a kick out of reading it anyway. “The threat of the rich is that they will flee the city,” Nolan writes. “The flaw in their leverage is that almost nobody likes them anyhow.”

New Yorkers are tired of seeing high-rise luxury condo buildings go up all over the city while most working people, including people who make enough money to live comfortably anywhere else, struggle and do without to make rent. Low-income people rent unfurnished basements that flood periodically. And the luxury apartments are often purchased by people who only live there part of the time. It’s somewhere to stay when they’re in New York. So they sit empty. No love lost. But the real-estate people are going to fight like hell to keep Mamdani from becoming mayor.

Before getting to the Big Ugly Bill, this just happened — this morning SCOTUS seriously wounded birthright citizenship. Further, it handed Trump a whole lot of power to further shred the Constitution. The Court didn’t address birthright citizenship directly, but in a 6-3 vote it decided federal courts could not issue universal injunctions. So the injunctions to stop Trump’s denial of birthright citizenship have, as I understand it, suddenly all been canceled. It may be that a court’s injunction could still be in effect in that court’s district, but I’m not yet sure. Anyway, watch ICE start rounding up people who were born here and presumed to be citizens all their lives. This is horrible.

Now, on to the Big Ugly Bill.

As I understand it, the One Big Ugly Bill has been pretty much gutted by the Senate Parliamentarian. The only surprise here is that as of this writing Trump hasn’t tried to fire the Senate Parliamentarian. I’m wondering if he even knows what’s going on with the bill. He’s been obsessed with getting credit as Master of World Peace and Military Brilliance, and also with who leaked the bombing assessment that makes him look bad.  I don’t know if they’ve covered the OBUB on Fox News much. And his staff may be afraid to tell him. So he might not fully appreciate what’s going on.

Yesterday the Parliamentarian stripped out a provision that would have curtailed states from taxing Medicaid providers. And why would states tax Medicaid providers? The taxes collected are returned to the providers in the form of state Medicaid funds, which then earns the state matching funds from the feds. It’s a way to game the system to get more Medicaid money, in other words. Every state but Alaska does this. Crippling the practice would be a handy way to cut Medicaid without explicitly cutting Medicaid. And stopping those matching funds would save the feds about $250 billion. But now it’s out. Some folks are saying that this change alone threatens the survival of OBUB.

This was only one of more than a dozen provisions the Parliamentarian nixed yesterday. And I understand she’s tossed out several more today already. Naturally the dimmer lights in Congress — such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tommy Tuberville —  are screaming furiously and calling for the Parliamentarian’s removal. So far, John Thune is saying he will abide by the Parliamentarian’s decisions. That may change if Trump ever weighs in.

However —  and this is pure speculation — it may be that at least some GOP senators are secretly welcoming the Parliamentarian’s shredding of OBUB. One, the bill is hugely unpopular. A whopping majority of the public doesn’t want it. Two, at least some of the GOP senators seem to realize the bill would have lots of nasty real-world consequences that people would actually notice and blame on them. And it really would create a ruinous dumpster fire of debt.

However, there’s also a lot of speculation in media that the GOP will come together and pass whatever pile of crap the bill has become this weekend, because Trump wants a bill to sign on the 4th of July. This leave them no time for negotiation. Whatever is approved for reconciliation is what the House will have to agree to. I think that’s unlikely, but we’ll see.

In other news —Trump Says He Gave Iran Permission to Bomb U.S. Base in Qatar and…Well, Mostly Crickets?

The first-round result of the New York City Dem primary certainly is welcome news. This is from the New York Times:

With NYC’s ranked choice system it’s still possible for Mamdani to lose the nomination.  Since he fell short of 50 percent,  there will be another round of vote counting.  Next week the least-popular first choice winner will be eliminated, and the second-rank choice on those ballots will be counted as firsts. The rounds continue until somebody gets more than 50 percent, or until there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. But if I were Mamdani I’d be feeling pretty good about my chances now.

The Republican nominee is Curtis Sliwa, of “Guardian Angels” fame, who ran unopposed. I have a hard time believing he can win a general election in New York City. He’s too much like Trump. Just a right-wing blowhard.

But it’s especially satisfying that Cuomo got significant top Democratic Party endorsements and way more money and he still couldn’t close the deal.

See Democratic Leaders Tried to Crush Zohran Mamdani. They Should Have Been Taking Notes. by Rebecca Kirszner Katz at the New York Times. The Democratic Party continues “to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices,” she writes, in favor of the Same Old Centrism that has been losing for them since forever.

Since their losses last fall, Democrats have obsessed over how to reverse their declining fortunes. By and large, the consensus has been that we need candidates with a sharp economic argument that can connect with young people, men, voters of color and the working class.

In the New York City mayoral race we got a candidate who checked many of those boxes: Mr. Mamdani.

My media consulting firm made ads for Mr. Mamdani, so maybe I’m a bit biased. But whether you agree with him on the issues or not, it’s clear from early results — and Mr. Cuomo’s stunning concession Tuesday night — that he succeeded. The race may not be called until next week, and the general election isn’t until November, but Mr. Mamdani indisputably managed to leap from obscurity to front-runner in mere months. He did so by staying relentlessly on message and grounding that message in affordability. Ask an Andrew Cuomo voter for some of his top policy ideas, and he or she will probably struggle to name one. Ask a Mamdani voter, and I bet he or she could name a few: “Freeze the rent,” “free buses,” “a city you can afford.”

For that matter, if you asked New Yorkers what Cuomo accomplished in his ten bleeping years as governor, you’d mostly get mumbles and head scratches. And he had to resign in disgrace. Yet as soon as he announced he was running for mayor, the Dem establishment got in line with money and endorsements and by all accounts was “terrified” by the possibility of a Mamdani win. What is wrong with these people? 

See also Nate Silver, Zohran delivered the Democratic establishment the thrashing it deserved.

There’s a legitimate worry that, if elected, Mamdani would fail to deliver on all his promises. Some of them will be a heavy lift, I think. But campaigning on nothing but empty pledges to “work for you” isn’t inspiring people that much.

In other news: The One Big Beautiful Bill is still stalled. Over the past few days the Senate parliamentarian has been taking lots of stuff out of it that failed to meet the “reconciliation” rules, which I believe I predicted. And which most of those Republican senators must have known would happen also.

Sarah Posner writes at Talking Points Memo,

Public support for the One Big Beautiful Bill is remarkably underwater by double digits in multiple polls, NBC reports. Similarly, bombing Iran is not popular, Greg Sargent explains at The New Republic. An analysis last week by the Pew Research Center found respondents had “mixed to negative views” on Trump’s immigration policies. The least popular actions, with the public disapproving by nine or more percentage points, were ICE raids at workplaces (-9%), building more detention facilities (-12%), ending Temporary Protected Status (-20%), suspending asylum applications (-21%), and deporting people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador (-24%).

This morning headlines that were not about the New York mayoral race were about the intelligence assessment that said Trump’s bombing set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. Naturally the administration is on the warpath to find out who leaked. And Trump is making The Usual Fool out of himself by insisting to anyone who will listen that his bombings were a brilliant military achievement comparable to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that “stopped the war.”

So yesterday evening Trump announced a cease fire with great exuberance and way too many exclamation points on Truth Social. And in a phone interview he confidently predicted the ceasefire would last forever.

“I think the ceasefire is unlimited. It’s going to go forever,” Trump said in a phone interview.

Asked whether the war was completely over, Trump said: “Yes. I don’t believe they will ever be shooting at each other again.”

Forever didn’t last long.

President Donald Trump said that he is “not happy” that Israel fired fresh rockets at Iran, adding that he is also displeased with Iran. He said today that he believed both sides violated the ceasefire, adding in a post on social media afterward that the truce remains in effect.

How can it be “in effect” if the two sides are still firing missiles at each other?

But soon after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday morning that Israel had accepted Trump’s plan, the Israeli military said it had identified a missile launched from Iran toward its territory—and vowed to launch new strikes in response.

Iran denied firing a missile after the ceasefire began but warned that it would give a “decisive and regretful response” if Israel resumed its attacks.

Outside the White House on Tuesday morning, a visibly angry Trump ranted against “gutless” and “loser” TV news networks and said he was unhappy with both Israel and Iran. His frustration, however, was especially directed at Israel, which he said needed to “calm down.”

Some poor sap in the House had already nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize because of the Great Ceasefire Deal. The Nobel Committee may be less than impressed.

But Trump always way underestimates how difficult long-standing problems are to solve. I mean, Nobody knew health care was so complicated, right?

Is the U.S. at war with Iran, or not? Opinions vary.

Another perspective on Why He Did It.

Amazing. NYT has more confirmation that Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was motivated in large part by the way the Israeli strikes were “playing” on Fox News, which drove him to want credit for it

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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) June 23, 2025 at 6:47 AM

I suspect this is pretty much it.  You can read the story here — Shifting views and misdirection: How Trump decided to strike Iran.

Mary Trump wrote, “Donald is still no doubt stinging from the acronym recently coined to mock his inability to follow through on anything—TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.” So he did the typical chickenhawk thing and put others in danger to show how tough he is. Further,

It is long past time that we stop imputing some deeper or reasonable motives to Donald Trump. Despite being depraved and cruel, much like his cohort Benjamin Netanyahu, he is driven by the most primitive impulses that center almost solely around protecting his fragile ego from humiliation (about which he has a pathological terror) and himself from the reality that he is a complete fraud.

See also Pentagon Worked Up ‘Ruse’ to Fool Iran on Strikes Because They Feared Trump Would Give It Away on Social Media: NYT. The military people were genuinely worried Trump would sabotage his own bombing mission by blabbing the plans on social media.

And, as usual,, Trump keeps stepping on his own talking points.

President Donald Trump’s top national security officials spent much of Sunday insisting his administration doesn’t want to bring about the end of Iran’s government, only its nuclear program. Then Trump left the door open for exactly that.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

J.D. Vance tried to argue that the U.S. wasn’t at war with Iran, just it’s nuclear weapons program. Which is stupid, but at least Vance is smart enough to understand that in the long run it will be better for the Trump Administration to argue that it hasn’t unilaterally declared war on Iran. But Trump has been blathering about “regime change” for the past couple of days.

We all see the parallels with the invasion of Iraq. But some things are different. Bush-Cheney-Rove, aided by right-wing media, spent more than a year before the actual invasion on a relentless propaganda campaign that falsely tied 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. All true American patriots were supposed to hate Saddam and support taking him out. Right now if you lined up a hundred random Americans and asked them who is the leader of Iran, probably most would not know his name (Ali Hosseini Khamenei) or know anything about him beyond his being “some ayatollah.” And many wouldn’t know even that much. Further, Iran hasn’t done anything to us lately. Not for a long time.

I expect the Republican Party and MAGA supporters to fall in line, but if the situation in Iran escalates and draws U.S. troops into more conflict, I suspect most Americans will not be happy about it or support what Trump is doing. If it stops with just the Saturday bombing raids, probably everyone will move on to the next disaster. But if Trump pushes this further, I don’t see the American people rallying around him. And he may not understand that.

In other news: Next Trump will be claiming that he wrote the Gettysburg Address.

Leavitt: “Nobody knows what it means to accomplish peace through strength better than President Trump. He is the one who came up with that motto and that foreign policy doctrine.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 23, 2025 at 8:39 AM

If “peace through strength” sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s been said a lot. Starting with the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century CE. Ronald Reagan used to say it a lot also.

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The Pentagon says that a total of 14 “bunker-buster” bombs were dropped on the deep underground nuclear facility of Fordo. And according to reporting today, the facility was damaged but not completely destroyed. We have no idea if Iran’s nuclear program was set back all that much. There has been no rise in detectable radiation levels at any of the bombed sites, which strikes me as a tad odd, but I’m no expert in these matters. While Trump was quick to claim supreme success, it may be a few days before we know if the bombings had any significant effect on Iran’s nuclear programs, whatever they were.

And, of course, there was no intel whatsoever calling Iran an imminent nuclear threat to anybody. I’m assuming Trump just chose to believe what Bibi told him. Rolling Stone:

… according to two administration officials with knowledge of internal deliberations in recent weeks, the president’s decision to strike was not driven by any new U.S. intelligence on Iran.

“There is no intel,” says one of the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Nothing new, that I’m aware of… The president is protecting the United States and our interests, [but] the intelligence assessments have not really changed from what they were before.”

“What they were before” was that Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons and wasn’t actively working on building nuclear weapons.

Another issue is whether Trump properly notified Congress before engaging in an act of war against another nation. “The top two Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, were both notified of the US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities ahead of time, according to multiple GOP sources,” says CNN. But no Democrats knew about it until they saw it on the news. The bombings seem to fall into a hole not clearly covered by the War Powers Act or anything else. If the bombings turn out to be a one and done thing, probably nobody is going to call Trump out for it. But if troops are put in danger, or are drawn into any armed conflicts as a result of the bombings, Trump is supposed to get congressional approval to proceed. And he’s allergic to having to ask permission to do anything.

Note also that before the bombings a lot of people were yelling at Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to get off their butts and insist on congressional authorization for any military action Trump took toward Iran. They did nothing. Peter Beinart wrote in the New York Times a couple of days ago,

From the moment Israel struck Iran, it was obvious the United States might be sucked in. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made it clear he wanted Washington to join Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. And on the day of the first attack, when Tehran retaliated by launching missiles at the Jewish state, the United States helped shoot them down.

Despite this, the initial statements by the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, and their House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said nothing about the need for Congress to authorize war. As the days passed and news reports suggested that Mr. Trump was edging toward entering the fray, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, invoked the War Powers Act to require the president to gain congressional permission. Thomas Massie, a Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat, proposed something similar in the House.

Neither Mr. Schumer nor Mr. Jeffries has signed on. Nor has Mr. Schumer agreed to co-sponsor another bill that Senator Bernie Sanders introduced, prohibiting funding for military force against Iran absent congressional approval (despite backing the same legislation in 2020).

I mean, did they have better things to do? Schumer has frustrated me for years. But I’m starting to think Jeffries isn’t an improvement. Of course they couldn’t have gotten anything passed, but sometimes just getting on the record that you tried is a good thing.

The best thing I’ve read so far about the bombings is by Marcy Wheeler, When Hegemons Backslide. Just read the whole thing. Very briefly, she’s saying that Trump’s foreign policy has been to destroy U.S. global hegemony — “soft power,” if you will — in favor of U.S. military dominance. And this is because Trump is a stupid man with little understanding of history or how the international order was working before he started to smash it. He only understands dominance. In his world, you’re either dominating others or they’re dominating you.

Related to that is my long contention that Trump doesn’t know how to function in a large, complex organization like a government. He’s never had a job. He has no personal experience of being part of a big multi-level corporation with lots of divisions and many layers of management. He’s used to running a family business. His company may be “large,” in that it has holdings in a lot of places, but it’s just him and the boys running it, for good or ill. He’s never had to work “with” anybody, Clearly, he doesn’t know how. He knows one way to function, which is him making all the decisions and giving all the orders. He can’t cope with having to negotiate with or get consent from other branches of government to do what he wants to do. In his first term he had people telling him what he could and couldn’t do, but not now. And the Republicans in Congress are letting him get away with it.

Back to the bombing. Josh Marshall:

We should remember that you can’t destroy the quest to create a nuclear weapons (or more specifically the quest to have all the parts and knowledge to do so on short notice) with bombing alone. If you take the logic of this action on its own terms it has to set the stage for negotiations or effective deterrent. In other words, one option is you hopefully destroy a lot of what Iran has spent years building. With that done, you hope they are more open to an agreement that gets them to verifiably agree not to work on the building blocks for nuclear warheads because you’ve demonstrated that the costs are too great. Or perhaps with this demonstration you make clear that any rebuilding effort will be met by another similar or more devastating attack. So they give up on the effort because they decide it’s not worth it or simply hopeless. You’ll always destroy the work before it gets to completion.

Absent one version of those scenarios being the case they just restart their efforts and get there again in say two or three years. And presumably that’s an Iran far more focused on actually building a deliverable nuclear weapon to be sure it never finds itself in this position again.

So, in the long run Trump may have just made matters worse.

Update: The New York Times is reporting that Trump officials have conceded they don’t know exactly where Iran was keeping its near-weapons-grade uranium stockpile or if any of their bombs destroyed it. If the stockpile is undamaged, that might explain why no one has detected any uranium leaks at the bombing sites. And Iran is saying no more negotiations with the U.S., and I can’t say I blame them. So it may be that Trump just plain screwed up with the bombing.

Well, I guess the moron did it. This is the home page of the New York Times

Here’s the Times’s coverage. Trump has already declared the raids a “great success.” Josh Marshall reminds us that Trump may be a bit premature in his assessment. Not the first time, of course. Maybe somebody can find the old banner and hoist it over the White House, or something. But damage assessments can take some time.Trump can’t possibly know how “successful” any of this was, yet.

Josh continues,

Let’s state the obvious that the US has committed a major act of war against another country without any specific immediate or even medium term threat. This is not a token bombing of the kind the US has done more than a few times in the post-Cold War era to make a point.

Dropping bombs on the Houthis in Yemen has almost become a presidential tradition. Bombing Iran is different, and I’m not sure Trump is bright enough to appreciate the difference. Maybe he’ll stop at these three bombing raids, and maybe there won’t be any blowback that hits our troops in t he region. Maybe. Or maybe Trump is about to be schooled in the deep meaning of the word quagmire.

Best comment on Bluesky —

It’s a good thing Congress isn’t alive to see this

— Stone Cold Jane Austen (@abbyhiggs.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 8:47 PM

Let’s start with a requiem for the White House Rose Garden. There has been a garden in this same area of the White House lawn since the days of Edith Roosevelt, Teddy’s wife. It became a rose garden in Ellen Wilson’s time.  And during the Kennedy administration, it became Jackie’s Rose Garden. The Kennedy-era garden was not, strictly speaking a “rose garden” but was a flower garden with a variety of flowers and crabapple trees. And it was designed by some famous garden designer, but I bet Jackie had a lot of input.

But during the Trump I Administration, Melania got rid of the crabapples and the flowers and turned it into this:

We’re told the sidewalk was added because ladies with heels had a hard time walking on the grass. And now we won’t even have the grass, because Trump is having it all paved over.

I take it the reason for this is that it’s hard to get big media equipment onto the grassy lawn for “rose garden” events. Except there’s no rose garden any more. Couldn’t they have paved some other part of the grounds for the media equipment and the ladies with high heels and leave Jackie’s garden alone? I swear, that man turns everything he touches into something tacky and ugly.

In other news: A week ago I wrote that Trump had decided to stop immigration raids that affected the agriculture and hospitality industries. Well, skip that. It appears Trump genuinely wanted to hold off on agriculture and hospitality, but  Stephen Miller and Tom Homan overruled Trump and plan to continue the raids. And is this a big red flag that Trump is not really running much of anything now, but his mouth?

In more other news: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to let Trump retain control of the National Guard he federalized in California. This didn’t surprise me. Analyses of last week’s hearing all predicted that’s what the court would do, although one could always hope everyone was wrong. The only analysis of the decision I have found is at Reason magazine, which I usually ignore.  And the column in Reason in which it appears is a continuation of what was once a right-wing political blog. But the analysis seems reasonable to me. Most of the written decision seems to lean away from Trump having the authority to unilaterally federalize the Guard in Los Angeles, but the court applied a “a highly deferential standard of review.” So while they didn’t entirely agree with the administration’s arguments, they are letting Trump get away with it. Naturally, Trump is planning to deploy more troops.

Is AI Over-Hyped? There was a thread at Bluesky that argued that women are more skeptical of, or at least less credulous about, AI than men. That would include me, as I am definitely an AI skeptic. I think it’s useless, frankly. You can’t trust anything it does. So I read with interest this essay on a Harvard website, Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate.

Will Trump go to war in Iran? The best news I heard this morning is that the Kremlin opposes regime change in Iran. It’s obvious that Trump is utterly befuddled. He’s put Israel on a “two week” hold. Wars can’t be put on hold. There is talk of restarting negotiations, although Iran wants a cease-fire first. But as of yesterday it was looking as if Trump was working up to Take Out Saddam Hussein II.

Fox News bobbleheads are screaming to invade Iran, often using some of the same arguments that got us into Iraq. But other parts of MAGA are pushing in the other direction. And Steve Bannon is calling for an investigation of Fox News. Most of the hard-core MAGAts are isolationists, I take it.

Believe it or not, there is a very good, and thoughtful, analysis of the Israel-Iran-Trump-neocon-isolationist mess we’re in now at The American Conservative.

Yesterday when I was buying groceries the young man at the cash register was talking with another employee about bombs dropping on the U.S., probably on New York City. If there are bombs, he said, he’d be on the first plane back to Ecuador. I asked who was planning to bomb us, and he said Iran. I assured him that Iran isn’t capable of such a thing at the moment, and I don’t believe it is. But I wished him good luck, anyway.

Today Iran’s ambassador to the UN said something along those lines in a press conference, but who was saying it yesterday? Somebody must have, somewhere. Just not in any of my regular media sources. Are we going back to melting down over yellowcake and centrifuges? Of course Iran could assault U.S. troops stationed in the region, not to mention U.S. ships and aircraft recently deployed to the region. So there are real risks here.

Trump is suddenly sounding very hawkish.

As others have said in other contexts, — who’s “we,” Kemosabe?  I take it no decisions have been made yet, but Trump must be seriously considering getting in on Israel’s action in Iran. Some news stories say Trump is being “pressured” by Israel, but Josh Marshall has another take.

As I noted earlier, what’s driving Trump here is the hunger to get in on a “win.” It might be best to see it as a typical Trumpian branding exercise. Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it. …

… Israel has created the circumstances which allow Donald Trump a risk-free “win” of immense magnitude. That is the issue here. Set aside whether or not doing this is wise. I’m talking about why we’re suddenly here. Why two or three days ago the White House was clear they weren’t getting involved and suddenly it all changed. The evolution here is that the Israelis have created an opportunity Trump simply cannot resist. A big, big win with very little risk in the short term. All the force is on one side of the question and nothing is pushing back in the opposite direction. It’s less an evolution of views than simple physics.

Of course, there’s more than the short term. But that’s not how Trump thinks.

The official White House position as of a few minutes ago or so is that Iran is “very close” to having nuclear weapons. Whether that’s true or not depends on whom you ask and what you mean by “very close.” From what I can gather, experts who are not speaking for Israel or for Donald Trump do not think Iran has nuclear weapons now, or has the ability to assemble such weapons by next week. But they could possibly do so within, maybe, a few months. It’s hard to say, since they don’t allow inspections.

Whatever. The new White House position is that Iran is imminently dangerous. Poor Tulsi Gabbard suddenly finds herself at odds with an increasingly hawkish Trump. 

Those tensions came to the forefront early Tuesday when a reporter aboard Air Force One asked Trump about Gabbard’s declaration before Congress in March that Iran was not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. Trump appeared to dismiss her assessment.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump replied. “I think they were very close to having a weapon.”

I guess it doesn’t matter that he blows off security briefings. For Trump, the truth is whatever he says it is.

Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic,

You may have heard it said that Donald Trump won in 2024 in part by vowing to end “forever wars.” During the campaign, Trump ripped Democrat Kamala Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney, slamming her for wanting “war with every Muslim Country known to mankind.” News organizations credulously insisted that this sort of anger over military entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled Trump’s “movement.” Some even suggested that war fatigue—not his unflagging affection for Vladimir Putin—drove Trump-MAGA opposition to arming Ukraine.

A new battle between Trump and Tucker Carlson over Israel’s war with Iran is severely undermining that understanding of MAGA. Carlson and MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon, among others, have been urging Trump not to deploy the U.S. military in tandem with Israel. Trump appears close to doing so, and people like Carlson and Bannon are loudly proclaiming that this would betray the MAGA movement—which in turn is angering Trump.

But I take it there are other rightie influencers who are breaking with Trump over this.  The thing is, last year during the campaigns the right-wing media bubble was portraying Joe Biden as a warmonger and Trump as a peacekeeper. I started running into MAGAts on social media who called Trump a “man of peace” and were critical of Biden for starting wars, although if pressed on precisely which wars Biden had started they seemed confused. And this was the sort of propaganda that those not plugged into right-wing media would easily have missed.

But I do think “Trump will keep us out of wars” was a big part of the Trump cult mythos. And, yeah, I don’t doubt that 20 years ago some of these same people were all fired up to invade Iraq. But the wingnut Right seems mostly to have flipped back to being isolationists, which the Right hasn’t been since the 1930s. Can they all be re-flipped to support Trump if he decides to aid Israel against Iran? And what do his good buddies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar think about this? And for that matter, where is Congress? Oh, never mind … Everybody who thought Trump was a “man of peace” needs to get with the program.

Where we stand at the moment, according to the New York Times:

President Trump said Wednesday that the United States may join the Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. But he also said the U.S. may not.

“Nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he said during an event to install flag poles outside the White House.

I’m sure Trump doesn’t know what he’s going to do, either. I just hope Iran doesn’t say or do anything that pisses him off in the next few days. It’s always possible he’ll cool off and go back to isolationism, and then take credit for how brilliant he was to do that.

In other news: I want to say something about the arrest of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander by Ice yesterday.  And, yes, that was just wrong. But now I’m wondering if this could shake up the Dem primary election for mayor. The primary is June 24, but early voting started June 14.

As you probably know, Andrew Cuomo is running and has been leading, by a little, in the polls. I seriously do not want Andrew Cuomo to win. The city’s progressives appear to be coalescing around another candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who has been closing in on Cuomo in the polls. Cuomo’s well-funded super PAC launched a $5.4 million attack ad campaign reminding voters that back in 2020 Mamdani said something about defunding the police. I don’t know if that tactic will work as well in NYC as it does in Missouri, but we’ll see.

Brad Lander has been running third. Late last week Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed each other, which only makes sense in the context of NYC’s ranked-choice voting system. Instead of voting for one candidate, voters are asked to list their top five favorite candidates by rank. (Although they can choose just one candidate, if they like.) If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the ballots are recounted in rounds. The candidate with the least votes is eliminated. So for those ballots that had that candidate first, in the next round votes for the candidates listed second are counted. And if nobody has more than 50 percent, there’s another round. So it’s hard to know how a bump in support for Lander will affect the race. But polls have Cuomo just under 50 percent, so there could be multiple rounds of counting. I’d be happy if Cuomo got knocked out of the race by a can of soup, but I’d also be very pleased with either Mamdani or Lander as the nominee. Fingers crossed.