I’ve long hated Third Way, the useless political organization dedicated to making Democrats more Republican. Here’s an old post from 2013 in which Third Way was on a tear to promote Democrats willing to say they would cut Social Security and Medicare, because (according to Third Way) that’s what real centrist Americans want from their government.

Well, they’re still at it. See Henry Burke’s reporting at The American Prospect, Centrists: Better Things Aren’t Possible. The subhead is, “Third Way’s strategy session for Democratic moderates lacked any vision other than a hatred for progressives.”

Third Way had a recent event that was attended by “elected officials, prominent pundits, data gurus, communication savants, and industry figures.” It was invitation only, so no ordinary working folks could attend. The objective was “to block a progressive from winning the party’s nomination for president in 2028.” The conceit of the event was that the people in attendance are the ones who feel the pulse of “real Americans,” while progressives are “elites” and “out of touch.” So they haven’t learned anything from 2013. Henry Burke wrote,

What is immediately apparent watching the event is a total lack of any positive vision. Rather than propose a worked-out centrist platform, or even suggest opposition to the Trump administration, the event largely defined itself in opposition to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The invite-only event (which was also broadcast on YouTube for me, and approximately 15 others, to watch live) opened with Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, explaining that those gathered at the event stood opposed to, among other things, “open borders,” “modern monetary theory,” “land acknowledgments, identity politics, cancel culture, and more.” The goal of the gathering, as explained by Cowan, was to rebuild the Democratic Party into one that “can win the middle anytime, anywhere.” Winning, if the speakers are to be believed, is trivially simple. The only thing standing in the way of a resurgent Democratic Party that can win across the country—both in blue states and red—is a progressive wing that had soured the public on the Democratic brand.

Opposition to Trump and even the war he had just started were barely mentioned, Burke writes. Clearly, these things weren’t important to them. You really have to read the whole thing to get how bizarre these people are. Through the entire piece Burke describes how the group uses manipulated data to “prove” that those in attendance were the ones who really understand ordinary Americans, not those wackadoo progressives. And don’t forget that Third Way is genuinely influential and is believed and respected by a lot of Democratic political operatives.

Then hop over to The New Republic and read Perry Bacon’s Guess What Moderate Democratic Voters Aren’t Anymore? Moderate. The subhead: “Two new polls suggest that moderate Democrats too want higher taxes on the rich and some measure of economic populism. Moderate isn’t what it was in 1992.” It turns out that Democratic voters who self-identify as moderate harbor political opinions that are to the left of what Third Way calls “moderate.” The moderate Dem voters Third Way wants to appeal to are becoming extinct. Perry Bacon writes,

Third Way and other centrist Democratic groups espouse positions such as opposing Medicare for All and wealth taxes. In Washington, the idea that these groups speak for moderates across the country is never questioned. But now, some evidence is emerging that suggests Democratic voters who describe themselves as moderate are in a different place. They want Democrats to push harder to increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations and don’t think the party is overly liberal on issues such as abortion and transgender rights. 

The young folks especially are not buying what the centrism-lovers want them to believe. And there’s this:

Other polls have similar findings. For example, recent Strength in Numbers/Verasight surveys show that 74 percent of moderate Democrats favor the creation of a single-payer health care system, and 67 percent of them support increased taxes on households with incomes above $400,000. Seventy percent of moderate Democrats have favorable views of Sanders, compared to only 20 percent who view him unfavorably, according to a Data for Progress survey conducted last month. 

The plain truth is that unfettered capitalism combined with a small and loose “safety net”  are not working for a lot of people, and a lot of people are noticing. They want to hear alternatives.

Do see G. Elliott Morris and Strength in Numbers.

Americans are unhappy with the way things are going in the country, and don’t feel particularly well represented by either major political party. In our new February Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, 53% of U.S. adults say the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most Americans. An identical percentage — 53% — say the same about Republicans.

The conventional reading of numbers like these — especially after Kamala Harris’s loss in 2024 — is that when voters say a party is “out of touch,” they mean so in terms of ideology. For the Democrats, for example, “out of touch” gets mapped onto “too progressive” — with the implication that to become “in touch,” the party needs to tack to the ideological center.

Our February poll tested this assumption directly, and the assumption is simply wrong. When Americans say Democrats are “out of touch” they don’t only — or even primarily — mean “too progressive.” This type of thinking is another example of people committing the Strategist’s Fallacy instead of thinking about what is really being measured by the poll question being asked.

Morris goes on to say that the Democrats — and Republicans also — have a brand problem, but not the brand problem Third Way is trying to solve. Even self-identified “moderate” Democrats are way to the left of Third Way on policy. What worries them about the Democratic party is that the Dems are weak and ineffectual. Yeah, because they are listening to Third Way nonsense.

Assuming that Trump doesn’t blunder us into a global thermonuclear war and get us all killed, I do wonder what future historians will make of the Trump Administration. One phenomenon that they are likely to note is that Trump’s presidency would have been more successful if he’d done absolutely nothing.

When Trump took office in January 2025, the U.S. economy was the envy of the world, according to The Economist. Inflation was coming down, More than 2 million jobs had been added in 2024 (2.2 million jobs, an average of 186,000 per month, down from 2023’s average of 251,000), which was not spectacular but certainly respectable. Compared to most other nations still struggling to recover from the Covid restrictions, the U.S. was doing great. What can stop the American economy now? The Economist asked.

Well, it turned out to be Donald J. Trump. Inflation has gone up, not down. U.S. job growth has slowed significantly. 2025 was the weakest year for job growth since 2020, adding only about 584,000 new jobs.  February 2026 saw an unexpected loss of 92,000 jobs, driven by declines in manufacturing, construction, and healthcare, with the unemployment rate rising to 4.4% (it was 4% in January 2025). Much of this economic weakening comes directly from Trump’s stupid tariffs and the way he gets off on playing tariff god and changing them frequently, making it impossible for businesses to plan for future business.

Now he’s discovered that having a military is fun!  So he gets us involved in a war in Iran, and today headlines are screaming that oil prices are soaring. Way to go. Even a reasonably bright high school student could have seen that coming.

If he’d just coasted on the economy Joe Biden had set up for him — as he coasted on Barack Obama’s economy in his first term — he would have looked good. His dimwit followers would have given him all the credit for continued economic stability and growth. Now, who knows? The nation will almost certainly be much poorer once he’s done with it.

His poll numbers are bad, but not nearly as bad as they should be if we assume most U.S. adults are bright enough to be able to eat with a fork and tie their own shoes. Michael Tomasky writes that the myth of Trump’s competence doesn’t seem to die.

We’ve seen numerous examples in these last 13 months of Trump’s mendacity and malevolence. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will never see him that way. There are those who adore him unconditionally, but beyond these dead-enders, there are others who know he’s not a good person but aren’t all that bothered by it.

That’s hard for millions of us to accept. But I hope to God that these people are finally starting to move themselves toward the conclusion that, even if they aren’t that troubled by the mendacity and malevolence, the man is just wildly incompetent. A mountain range of mythmaking has gone into creating the Trump persona over the years; by him, by a pliant business press in his real estate days, and, since he entered politics, by a right-wing media that would make the old Soviet press agencies blush and a party of cowardly sycophants, most of whom know very well that he shouldn’t be in charge of a high-volume McDonald’s, let alone the executive branch of the federal government, but would rather let the country collapse than say so.

I remember a conversation I had with a Biden White House official in the spring of 2024, when Joe Biden was still running. I was asking about Trump’s weaknesses, and this official said something to me that may stand as the single most depressing couple of sentences I’ve ever had directed at me in 30-plus years of covering politics. We’re not going to dislodge people’s belief that he’s a great businessman, this official said; forget it. It’s hardwired in there, and undoing it, for a significant percentage of the people, just isn’t going to happen.

Remember how we were yelling at the media about “sanewashing” all through 2024? Remember all the times news stories didn’t bother trying to explain to people that Trump clearly doesn’t know how tariffs work?  I sincerely hope a lot of news people are rethinking how they cover politics.

Trump’s actual record as a businessman is a rolling disaster. This was reported in a lot of print media, but people getting their news from television would never have heard the truth about how badly and how frequently Trump failed at business. Before he began hosting The Apprentice in 2004, he was in so much debt it’s not entirely clear what was keeping him afloat. There are rumors he was getting lifelines from the Russian mob, who used him for money laundering purposes. The Apprentice put him back on his feet and sold him to the American public as some kind of business genius, which he never was. I bet most Americans still don’t realize how badly they were bamboozled.

Can anyone think of anything Trump has done these past 15 months that actually made life in the United States better? Nothing is coming to my mind. Everything he does just makes everything worse, from destroying the East Wing and screwing with the Kennedy Center to stripping millions of American of their health care and food benefits to starting a stupid war. If he is so worried about the midterms he should have tried to be a better POTUS. But he doesn’t know how. If he’d just done nothing but show up in his office in a suit and take part in an occasional medals ceremony or ribbon cutting he’d be in better shape politically than he is now. And so would the nation.

The Shield of the Americas thing reminds me of a classic World War I poster.

Those were simpler times. Anyway, Trump hosted a Shield of the Americas summit today in Florida. Leaders from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Trinidad and Tobago attended, as did a bunch of Trump’s people. The Gnome was there also, as she’s supposed to head up this thing, whatever it is. And I have questions.

As near as I can tell from news stories the Shield has two purposes. One is to use military operations to smash drug cartels in Latin America. The other is to take over Cuba somehow or another. Putting Cuba aside for now — smashing the drug cartels would be a good thing, but I don’t know enough about drug cartels to know whether this is an effective way to do it.

According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the U.S. already is doing great things in Ecuador.

The U.S. military carried out a “successful” operation against a “narco-terrorist” supply complex in Ecuador as part of the Trump administration’s push to dismantle drug-trafficking networks in the Western Hemisphere, according to defense officials. 

At the request of Ecuador, a U.S. military joint force executed the targeted action against a suspected drug-smuggling facility inside Ecuador on Friday, Pentagon’s chief spokesperson Sean Parnell said. 

It is unclear if there were casualties and which drug-trafficking group the military was referring to. 

Who knows what they’re doing in Ecuador? And if I were some Latin American leader I would think twice about letting a bunch of U.S. troops gain a foothold in my country, at least while President “all the Western Hemisphere are belong to me” Trump is in the White House. Is he thinking of putting military assets into a position to take out any Latin American leader he doesn’t like? Or because it’s Tuesday and he’s bored of blowing up boats?

Here are some of Trump’s remarks from the Summit:

Trump also addressed the U.S. military’s ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, calling the operation “18 minutes of pure violence.” He commended the South American nation’s interim leader Delcy Rodriguez for “working with us.”

“I mean, she’s doing a great job because she’s working with us,” the president said. “If she wasn’t working with us, I would not say she’s doing a great job. In fact, if she wasn’t working with us, I’d say she’s doing a very poor job. Unacceptable.”

So, Latin American leaders, if you know what’s good for you you’ll play ball like Delcy. Capiche?

He added that U.S. companies are “taking out tremendous amounts of oil” from Venezuela.

The claim is a tad exaggerated. As near as I can tell from web searches, the only U.S. company that is actually extracting oil out of Venezuela right now is Chevron, which was already in Venezuela when Trump took out Maduro. They’re producing roughly 240,000 barrels per day, which may sound like a lot but doesn’t qualify as a “tremendous amount.” It’s actually more of a “trickle.” Saudi Arabia, for example, produces 10 million barrels a day, or at least they were before the war started. There are a couple of other U.S. oil companies buying Venezuela crude and refining it, but they aren’t in Venezuela taking it out of the ground. Most of the big U.S. petroleum companies like ExxonMobil and  ConocoPhillips are hanging back and monitoring ongoing events to see if it’s worth investing in Venezuela. So far, they haven’t.

So the question is, does Trump understand that there really isn’t much oil being extracted from Venezuela? And if he does know that, does he think the Latin American leaders he’s addressing don’t know that? Because I’m sure they do. Or was the comment just for U.S. media, which will dutifully report the quote without explaining it’s a lie?

Regarding Cuba, Trump claims that there are some kind of negotiations going on.

President Donald Trump told CNN Friday morning that Cuba “is going to fall pretty soon.”

“Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is gonna fall too. They want to make a deal so badly,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash in a phone interview when touting US military success in his second term.

“They want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put Marco (Rubio) over there and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready — after 50 years,” he added, explaining that Iran is the current priority.

This may be nothing but a fantasy in Trump’s head. Who knows? Anybody want to take bets the current government of Cuba will still be in place when Trump is gone? Greg Sargent writes that Donald Trump’s Presidency Is in Free Fall. This is worth reading all the way through, but I’m just going to quote the concluding paragraph:

That supreme hubris is now breaking up on the shoals of Trump’s malevolence and incompetence on tariffs, his undisguised white nationalist brutality on immigration, and his sociopathic warmongering amid an obvious lack of any real war rationale. In 2024, Trump coasted on (undeserved) GOP strength on the economy, immigration, and national security, but those pillars are now crumbling. Americans are seeing the real “America First” agenda up close—militarism, imperialism, malign nationalism, unabashed authoritarianism—and they’re recoiling. Though this is small consolation amid all the darkness enveloping us, it’s nonetheless a heartening development indeed.

I also recommend a couple of pieces at The Atlantic (gift links). See Tom Nichols, Operational Excellence, Strategic Incompetence and Rogé Karma, The Economy’s Warning Light Is Flashing Yellow.

Trump needs to have a talk with his best bud Putin.

Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces, officials say 

Since the war began Saturday, Russia has passed Iran the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft, said the three officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

I take it from reading the rest of the news story that the Trump Regime is pretending this either isn’t happening or isn’t a problem.

But there’s more. This is a longish speech from Sen. Whitehouse, but worth watching.

Josh Marshall’s summary:

It’s about Trump, Russia and Jeff Epstein. Among other things, it reminds us of how Bill Barr bamboozled most of the U.S. press into thinking the Mueller investigation came up empty on Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia. But this is a broader story. The speech runs almost an hour long. But it’s worth it. There’s so many details in the speech it defies easy summary. The best overview is to think of all the ways Donald Trump was and is connecting to the Russian government and the oligarch para-government. Whitehouse then shows that Jeff Epstein is right there at almost every point of contact. It’s a mix of old information, new investigating and a pretty close analysis of emails in the Epstein Files that wouldn’t really jump out at you on their own but become quite interesting when lined up with other outside information which places them in context. Whatever that “thing” is, Epstein is just as tied up in it as Trump —mand at a lot of points he seems to be a connecting tie. You can watch the speech after the jump.

Trump’s golden age economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. Unemployment is up to 4.4 percent. It’s been worse, and it was 4.0 percent when Trump took office. The point is that it’s not getting better.  There is no reason to believe it will get better now.

Trump’s war plans are getting more grandiose.

President Trump declared on Friday that he would settle for nothing short of “unconditional surrender” by Iran, the latest and broadest expansion of his goals for the conflict, and one that could portend a much longer conflict if he persists in that aim.

Six days into the Israeli and American bombing campaign, Iran has shown no interest, at least publicly, in surrendering. Instead, it has done the opposite, expanding the war to Arab states that host American bases, attacking them with missiles and drones, though in diminishing numbers in recent days.

Mr. Trump’s statement came in a social media post, in which he said that after the country’s surrender would come “the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s),” and promised that the United States and its allies “will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction.”

This is delusional, of course. I’m reading today that the Gulf states — UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait — are taking hits, and this could have repercussions than Trump and Hegseth and the rest of the crew haven’t thought about. There’s a lot they haven’t thought about.

See also Trump’s Fantasy Is Crashing Down by Lydia Polgreen at the New York Times.

In Donald Trump’s fantasy world, America is invincible and impregnable.

Its military is so advanced and skillful that it can pluck a sitting head of state from a hostile country and deposit him in a New York City jail cell without losing a single soldier. It can slap punitive tariffs on any nation it likes, abandon longstanding alliances on a whim, bomb any country at any time and freely blow up boats it may suspect of carrying drugs. America’s awesome power means it is unfettered by any rules, untroubled by any consequences. As an unfathomably rich and sprawling nation, blessed by geography and protected from its enemies by two vast oceans, why shouldn’t it do what it will?

Over the past six days, as Trump plunged the United States into a war with Iran, that fantasy of omnipotence has come crashing into reality. Undertaken for unexplained and perhaps unexplainable reasons, the war is being waged in a central node of the global economy against a disciplined, well-armed opponent with nothing to lose. America and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a dozen Iranian leaders on the first day of fighting, but Trump has clearly given little thought to what comes next. Recklessly, he has ignited a widening conflagration with no obvious end in sight. The death toll has already surpassed 1,000 people.

Do read the whole piece. Based on the quote from this morning I’m not sure Trump has given up on his fantasies yet. As I keep saying he loves simplistic solutions that offer a quick and easy fix. When they don’t work he either refuses to acknowledge they haven’t worked, or else we get the standard “nobody knew X was so complicated” excuse. And, of course, lots of people knew, but Trump refused to listen to them. The best we can hope for is that at some point soon he’ll realize he’s in a mess that’s just going to keep getting worse. And then maybe he’ll declare his goals have been met and he’ll bring the military back home, leaving Israel on its own. We can hope, I guess.

Trump fired Kristi Noem and intends to replace her with Oklahoma Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin. Mullins is a right-wing fanatic who used to run his family plumbing business and has also competed in mixed martial arts. So of course he’s qualified to run the Department of Homeland Security (/sarcasm). I’ve already heard it said that he’s the only politician in Washington dumber than the Gnome, other than Trump. See also John Light at TPM.

Unfortunately Trump is giving the Gnome a new job. She “will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida.” That sounds fairly terrifying.

I understand the turnout for the Democratic primaries in Texas yesterday was much higher than for the Republican primary. The same was true of North Carolina. Gpod omens. Democratic voters are more fired up. I’m sad that Jasmine Crockett won’t have a seat in Congress next year, of course. If the DNC were smart they’d find something for her to do to keep her visible until she can run again in 2028. Unfortunately, the DNC isn’t that smart.

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about why Trump decided to go to war with Iran. Most of them are nonsense, since they assume he has a coherent reason. I doubt that he does. This is why new reasons keep trickling out. The latest is that Iran was planning to assassinate Trump. Obviously, Trump had no other recourse than to go to war against Iran (she said, sarcastically). He’s also claimed Iran meddled in the 2020 election. Iran and the ghost of Hugo Chavez must have been in cahoots.

There are a couple of pieces at The Atlantic worth reading. I especially like The Paradox of Trump’s Iran Attack by David Frum. Here’s a bit:

You don’t go bankrupt as often as Trump has gone bankrupt if you’re good at assessing risk. Trump tells ridiculous fantasies presumably because he believes ridiculous fantasies. In his second administration, he has surrounded himself with sycophants who validate his ridiculous fantasies. When his fantasies unravel, Trump has a habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world. When the Federal Reserve does not rescue him from his economic mismanagement, he orders his Department of Justice to open criminal investigations into a Federal Reserve governor and the chairman himself. If an actual shooting war goes amiss—takes too long, fails to yield the cheap and easy success Trump craves—what follows at home may exceed all past abuses of power.

Yesterday Heather Cox Richardson wrote,

About a week before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, attacking Iran alongside Israel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that the lack of support from allies and depleted reserves of interceptors and Patriot missiles would make an attack on Iran risky.

Yet we’re spending money on this war like drunken sailors.

Alison Durkee of Forbes reported today that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 billion. The three F-15E Eagle jets lost to friendly fire on Sunday cost $90 million each. Transporting troops, ships, and aircraft to the Middle East cost about $630 million. Missiles and weapons systems are also expensive—a drone is about $35,000, and a Tomahawk missile costs millions—and the two aircraft carriers in the region together cost at least $13 million a day. And then there are the costs of operating aircraft, and so on.

Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus of Politico reported that lawmakers anticipate the administration will ask for supplemental funding for this operation, over and above the more than $150 billion the Republicans provided the Pentagon in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the nearly $839 billion in regular funding Congress appropriated in February.

I don’t think this falls under “America First.”

The other Atlantic piece is A Very Stable War by Jonathan Chait.

TheWall Street Journal reported on January 30 that Trump was planning a major military campaign, but was still “debating whether the main aim is to go after Iran’s nuclear program, hit its ballistic missile arsenal, bring about the collapse of the government—or some combination of the three.” Generally speaking, military strategists tend to first settle upon their objective, and then devise a tactic to achieve it. The Trump method of first deciding on the tactic, and only getting around to what he wants to accomplish afterward, is unorthodox.

A lack of clarity has continued to define the operation. In his videotaped message announcing the latest attacks, Trump repeated his boast that the previous round of air strikes, in June, had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.” But if the obliteration lasted only half a year, what value is there in re-obliterating it? Will biannual bombing campaigns be employed until Iran submits to American demands?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — Trump was never all that bright, and now he’s showing clear signs of dementia. Let’s stop pretending he has thought-out, coherent reasons. He’s mostly running on fumes and impulse now. Bibi Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman got in his head and persuaded him to go to war in Iran. That’s his reasons. He doesn’t really understand any of this stuff.

Plus there are are between 500,000 and 1 million US nationals in the Middle East who are now stranded. A lot of airports are closed; traveling isn’t safe. Staying in place may not be safe, either. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt helpfully said that they should have heeded State Department  travel warnings to not go there. Sure; I never go anywhere until I’ve checked with the State Department. But not all of those people are tourists. I’m sure a lot of those people are there on work assignments, or they are studying or doing research or are there for an extended visit. Well, good luck, folks. Don’t expect any help from your government.

Update: Earlier today The White House claimed Spain had agreed to let our military use some of their bases.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut off trade relations with Madrid over its refusal to let Washington use military bases on Spanish soil to attack Iran, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt claimed Spain had “agreed to cooperate with the U.S. military.”

Levitt said Madrid had heard Trump’s message “loud and clear” and was now coordinating action with Washington.

Um, but now Spain is saying that this is a lie.

The Spanish government was quick to dismiss the assertion, with Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares saying that he denies the White House’s claim “categorically”.

“Not a single comma has changed, and I have no idea whatsoever what they might be referring to,” Albares told Hora25 radio programme.

Jeezus, what a clown show.

I want to call your attention to a new piece by Judd Legum at Popular Information, The money behind the new Iran War.

In private calls over the last several weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) reportedly urged President Trump to attack Iran. Iran is a top regional rival of Saudi Arabia, and MBS had become concerned about Iran’s growing military capabilities.

The lobbying campaign achieved success on Saturday, when Trump announced he had begun “major combat operations in Iran.” Trump launched a war even though U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. In June 2025, Trump publicly declared that more limited strikes “completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.”

MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war.

Wall Street Journal reports that Trump changes his mind about the “mission” in Iran every few hours.

On Sunday alone, President Trump and his allies offered at least two separate objectives for the assault on Iran, muddying Washington’s intentions for ending a conflict that has engulfed the Middle East and killed three American service members.

Early Sunday morning, close Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said reducing the nuclear and missile threat from Iran was the intention, not regime change. The White House later reiterated that point in a statement.

Elaborating in an interview with the Atlantic, Trump said he was open to discussions with Iran’s current leadership that could end the war if U.S. demands were met.

But hours later, Trump swung back to one of his original goals from the beginning of the air assault on Saturday. In a video, he urged Iranians to “take back your country” from the regime, vowing the U.S. will “be there to help.”

The timeframe for military action has also changed. On Saturday, he posted on social media that the assault will last a week or more. A day later, he told the Daily Mail the fighting has “always been a four-week process.”

It’s likely MBS and Netanyahu both persuaded Trump that attacking Iran was a good idea and that some brilliant result would easily be achieved. Trump has a long history of grasping at simplistic ideas that he thinks will be quick and easy fixes to long-festering, complicated problems. It’s his most consistent trait, along with being hateful and corrupt. After the tactical success of his strike in Venezuela, he probably considers himself a military genius.

This is from today’s New York Post.

President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” by taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

Trump told the Daily Mail on Sunday that he estimated the war would last “four weeks or so,” but hinted to The Post Monday that that timeframe could be shortened.

“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”

As I wrote yesterday, he’s given several estimates of how long the Iran project will take. The earliest estimate I saw was that he expected to conclude the project this week sometime. But now it’s four weeks. And the conflict appears to be spreading. Overnight Israel attacked Hezbollah-controlled areas in Lebanon. And Iran launched a drone strike against a Saudi oil refinery.  Kuwait “mistakenly” shot down three U.S. F-15 fighter jets on Sunday; the crews all ejected safely.

Oh, goodie. I just noticed a new headline at the New York Times.

Brilliant. Trump is now speaking to reporters in the East Room of the White House. I am not listening, but if it’s reported he says anything noteworthy, I’ll add it.

Update: An Iranian drone struck a British military base in Cyprus.

This morning Trump told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic that Iran’s new leadership wants to talk. So Iran has new leadership already? So much for regime change.

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long,” Trump told me in a phone call from his Mar-a-Lago resort shortly before 9:30 a.m.

Except that there were ongoing talks, and word coming from the Foreign Minister of Oman that progress was being made.  Trump can’t keep his stories straight.

Trump expects the people of Iran to rise up and depose the old regime. Everything I’ve read from knowledgeable people is that Iran already had a plan for what would happen if the Supreme Leader was assassinated. As in Venezuela, most likely the “new leadership” is just a reshuffling of the old leadership. Don’t be too surprised if someone emerges as the new Ayatollah in a few weeks. As for a popular uprising taking over, I’m reading that Iran has a lot of different factions that don’t necessarily get along, and trying to form any sort of unified movement from that would be an uphill climb. See Trump is making dangerous assumptions about who will take power in Iran by Sam Kiley at The Independent.

Back to Michael Scherer at The Atlantic:

Soon after our conversation, U.S. military officials announced that three U.S. service members were killed in the operation and five more were seriously wounded—the first known American casualties of the campaign. Trump told me he expects the attack on Iran will not disrupt Republican efforts before this fall’s midterm elections to convince voters that his administration is focused on delivering economic benefits for the country. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had,” he told me. “The word isn’t out because people like you don’t write about it properly. But the economy is ready to go through the roof. And it already is in many cases.”

Sure it is. There is also a real possibility that the Iran stunt will drive up petroleum prices over the next several months, which will not be helpful to Trump’s “affordability” problem.

I’m also reading that Trump thinks the bomb Iran project will end in a week or so. He’s hoping it does, I’m sure. I’m reading that a lot of the MAGA faithful are not happy, but they might forgive Trump if the bombing actually ends soon. See also MAGA Reacts to Trump’s Strikes on Iran: ‘Absolutely Disgusting and Evil’ by Peter Wade at Rolling Stone.

“The attack came despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran’s forces were unlikely to pose an immediate threat to the U.S. mainland within the next decade,” says reporting in the Washington Post. The same reporting also said Trump was pushed into going along with an attack by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Bibi Netanyahu  Not exactly an “America First” duo. Trump has a history of listening to authoritarian strongmen before he listens to his own intelligence services.  I suspect unresolved daddy issues.

I recommend Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People by Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic. It reveals the Trump Administration to be a directionless mess. Various officials apparently are left to themselves to discern what U.S. policy is supposed to be, and their public statements are contradictory. And because Trump’s gang of obsequious amateurs is left to making up their jobs as they go along, often one part of the administration is working at cross-purposes with the other parts. Certainly more could have been done by other presidents to help/encourage the people of Iran to build an effective resistance against the Islamic regime. However, she continues,

The second Trump administration has gone much further in the opposite direction, actually dismantling tools that could have helped promote civic engagement and build a united opposition in Iran. The administration has taken money away from Iranian-human-rights-monitoring groups and defunded media projects. Under the leadership of the former Arizona political candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has prevented Radio Farda, the Farsi-language channel of the U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, from using American transmission equipment.

Voice of America, the U.S. government’s other Persian-language channel, cut back coverage and lost credibility by producing partisan broadcasts. The channel’s leadership has actually banned any mention of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran, who commands a substantial following both inside and outside the country. As a result, VOA lost ground to the Saudi-funded channel Iran International. Lake also cut funding for another agency, the Open Technology Fund, dedicated to providing virtual private networks and satellite access to Iranians, among others. That decision might also help keep Iranians inside the country isolated from the large dissident movement in the diaspora.

So while it’s possible the bomb Iran project will not turn out to be an utter waste of lives and resources — or worse, turn into a long-term regional war — any favorable outcome will not be because of the Trump Administration, but in spite of it. Because the Trump Administration isn’t qualified to run a bake sale.

We can afford wars, but not health care.

I understand that over the past several hours the Foreign Minister of Oman has frantically been telling the Trump Administration that a deal with Iran is really, really, close, and that Iran has agreed to “zero stockpiling” of enriched uranium. But Trump and his buddy Bibi Netanyahu started a war with Iran anyway.

With no congressional input, no real effort to rationalize a massive military intervention to the US people, and with negotiations ongoing, Trump took the US into a major war overnight. This isn’t a necessary or a rational war. It’s a calamitous intervention designed to feed the ego of one man.

— Sasha Abramsky (@sashaabramsky.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 8:58 AM

Yeah, pretty much. See also Simon Tisdall at The Guardian.

Complicating this is that Trump has received no authorization whatsoever from Congress to do diddly squat in Iran. Trump is in direct violation of the Constitution now. There has been a resolution intended to tie Trump’s hands floating around in Congress for a while. Congress is apparently in recess right now, which may be why Trump decided this was the time to strike. There are frantic calls to get everyone back to Washington to vote on the resolution.

See also Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. Along with obliterating Iran’s nuclear program — the same Trump obliterated a few weeks ago, as I recall — he is pushing for regime change.

… the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordnance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us.

Sounds like what Dubya thought would happen in Iraq.

Earlier this week, before the SOTU, I heard someone comment that Trump is not reading the room. After last night I’d say he’s dealing with two different rooms. The die hard MAGA devotees are certain he was brilliant last night. One even declared that last night the Democrats lost the midterms. According to the editorial board of the New York Post, Trump’s home-run State of the Union 2026 showed exactly how crazy the Democrats are. But most of the commentary, and the post-SOTU polls, say Trump’s act didn’t go over all that well.  The bottom line is that it probably didn’t change anyone’s opinion. And it’s looking like Trump’s die-hard fans are less than a third of the electorate. For some time polls have been saying the percentage of people who “strongly approve” of him has been stuck at closer to a fourth of the electorate, in fact.

I didn’t watch, but I’ve seen some outtakes. The bit of shtick where he makes fun of the word “affordability” seems to be a permanent part of his act now.  Trump doesn’t really give speeches as much as put on a variety show, as Tom Nichols wrote at The Atlantic. But whether at a rally or on national television, I can’t see how making fun of the word “affordability” endears him to anybody.

See also Who Said It Better? How Trump’s Economic Pitch Echoes Biden’s. This expresses something I’d already been thinking. I’ve read that a lot of voters turned against Joe Biden in 2024 because he kept saying “Bidenomics” was working,. and the economy was getting better, but people weren’t feeling it in their lives yet. But now Trump is doing the same thing.

Telling voters that the economy is better than they believe is a risky strategy, as Mr. Biden found out in his own truncated re-election campaign. He had spent months with an on-again, off-again branding exercise to sell “Bidenomics” as an economic miracle that never quite stuck. It did not matter that he was armed with a blizzard of macroeconomic data. Voters felt squeezed.

Now, with polls showing that a majority of Americans think that Mr. Trump’s policies have made life less affordable, he was the one trying to sell the idea that America has entered a “golden age.”

“The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” the president said, bragging about what he characterized as the stock market’s rise, the drop in gas prices and lower mortgage rates.

So I’m not too worried that Trump’s act last night cost Democrats the midterms. See also Paul Krugman’s analysis of the “speech.”

Yesterday there was reporting that the DoJ appears to have withheld key Epstein documents from public view, Further, there is reason to believe the withheld files contain allegations that Trump abused a minor. Greg Sargent has details.

Greg Sargent also writes that Trump’s ICE Is Quietly Stockpiling Weaponry—and It Should Alarm Us All. In brief, he writes that the Trump Administration has created a new “terror bureaucracy” that has pumped huge amounts of money into ICE and Border Patrol, creating an unprecedented military force that will likely be with us for many years.