I’ve been thinking about Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) lately. He came to my attention right after the 2024 general election, as Nehls accepted Trump as the leader of the Republican Party.

“So now he’s got a mission statement. His mission, his goals and objectives, whatever that is — we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word,” Nehls told Capitol Hill reporters in a clip that aired on MSNBC.

“If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it,” he added.

Yeah, the heck with representing your constituents and protecting the Constitution. But seriously, why even bother with a Congress?

This morning I read a post at Public Notice by Tom Schaller call The Vanity Presidency. Trump is “turning the whole country into a tacky branded property,” Schaller says. It begins this way —

Following the failed attempt on President Trump’s life at the White House Correspondents Dinner, lapdog Republicans and their media allies rushed to capitalize by arguing that the episode proves his very unpopular White House ballroom project has always been about presidential safety, not a self-glorifying tribute to himself.

“Everyone thought this was Trump making a monument to Trump. This is a vanity project,” the reliably smarmy Sen. Lindsey Graham snorted at Trump’s critics. (Graham wants to spend taxpayer dollars on the ballroom project, which he describes as “very national security-centric.

At this point Trump is little but a walking freak show, albiet one with a big military. His power comes from the fact that so many others prop him up and protect him. And in a lot of ways that’s the real story here.

The social psychologists tell us that political conservatives tend to value loyalty much more than liberals. You can find groupthink all along the political spectrum, but righties are more likely to assume all goodness emanates from the Right and the Left is just evil and possibly insane. Political lefties tend to be more willing to criticize their own and can give credit to conservatives who appear to be rational.

Some of this is baked into the emotional and psychological impulses that tilt people toward conservatism or liberalism. And I’m not saying there have never been political conservatives who are capable of critical thinking. Of course there have been, but where are they now? MAGA has zero tolerance for independent critical thinking. Instead we get variations of Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas).

Do see Historical Roots and Psychology of Liberals, Conservatives by Gina Simmons Schneider, Ph.D., at Psychology Today.  Liberals and conservatives really are wired differently. Liberalism is aspirational; conservatism is defensive. Studies have shown that conservatives tend to be far less tolerant of ambiguity than liberals, and more likely to be fearful of change or unfamiliar circumstances. They like certainly and consistency. And this is why conservatism, taken to extremes, becomes reactionary.

I tend to think that admitting to not-knowing is the beginning of wisdom. If you know you don’t know, you can learn. If you can’t recognize not knowing, you automatically fill in the blank spots with whatever is available at the time.  Humans are wired to connect mental dots to understand the world, but if we aren’t careful we often connect the wrong dots. The truly wise are people who can refrain from dot-connecting without sufficient knowledge.

So in a lot of ways political liberals and conservatives are approaching politics and issues from very different perspectives. But the knee-jerk conformity and denial of reality on today’s Right is giving Trump room to function, and screw up, and hurt people. And while there’s always been some of that, it’s worse now.

I can remember the Republican party fifty years ago. There was a spectrum, everything from the patrician, anti-progressive Old Right to Rockefeller Republicans to the segregationist Dixiecrats. Now they’re more like the Borg Collective. Nearly the entire party is prepared to jump three feet and scratch their heads on command.

And I believe this assimilation to the Borg predates MAGA. I think it’s something that’s been happening for a while. Back in the 1950s there was McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities and a lot of craziness generally. But there was also Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. I didn’t agree with everything he did, but he was psychologically normal and not a fearful sort of person. So while that tendency has been on the Right possibly since there has been a Right, the Republican party (which used to be the more liberal party, remember) had a big enough mix of people to be able to function as a party. Now it’s just Borg.

Trump is not going to last forever. A lot depends on the midterms, but I question whether he’s going to stay in office for the entire second term. But how can the current Republican party move on? Back when Nixon resigned there were several strong personalities in the party who had not been Nixon yes-men. These included Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater (I didn’t say I liked them), and John Anderson. Ronald Reagan was governor of California by then, I believe. Gerald Ford wasn’t necessarily a Nixon guy in spite of being his veep, briefly.

But — just speculating here — if Trump were removed from office next year, taking whatever Trumpism is with him, who among the spineless sycophants in the Republican party will be able to reconstitute a viable political party out of the wreckage of the GOP?

If you missed last night’s brief post, please do read the interview of Paul Krugman by Greg Sargent that I wrote about there if you haven’t already.

Today the New York Times had a front-page article headlined Trump Faces the Complicated Reality of a Costly, Unpopular War in Iran, by Zolan Kanno-Youngs.  (I decided to not burn one of my limited number of gift articles for the month on it. but if someone can contribute one, please do.) What really struck me was the headline. Trump isn’t “facing” anything. He wants to hold out until he can find something he can call a win. But none of the options he wants are viable now, and he’s refusing to accept reality. As Krugman said yesterday, “A guy who can’t admit that he lost a presidential election to Joe Biden is not going to be able to admit that he lost a war to the mullahs of Iran.” but he really has lost.

And now for something completely different — I had found an online U.S. history forum that appeared to be interesting at first. Then someone posted a question that in effect asked which of a group of politicians would have been the best person to serve as president during the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Kennedy was one of the choices, but so was Richard Nixon. And to my astonishment, one respondent after another chose Nixon. Nixon was, in fact the “obvious” choice, they all said.

This was disorienting, I thought most of the die-hard Nixon supporters were dead by now. These appeared to be young people. And at one point I actually asked, is there some kind of right-wing propaganda push going on to rehabilitate Richard Nixon?

And yes, folks, there is indeed a right-wing propaganda push going on to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. I found a news story about it. See The Campaign to Make Richard Nixon Great Again at NBC News, from November 2025. This effort has some of the usual suspects behind it, such as Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, but they’ve actually gotten some of their disinformation into real public schools. It’s a real assault on history.

In the right-wing alternative history universe Nixon was a rock of unwavering defiance against the nefarious forces of Communism. John Kennedy — who actually did handle the Cuban Missile Crisis pretty well, as I remember — was a pretty boy fluff head compared to Nixon.  Watergate was a setup by the Deep State; Nixon didn’t do anything wrong. Oh, and Nixon won the Vietnam war, according to the group participants. I’m serious; he won it. News to me, and I remember the Vietnam war pretty darn well.

I knew you’d want to be advised. Oh, and at some point I was blocked from that forum. Works for me.

“A guy who can’t admit that he lost a presidential election to Joe Biden is not going to be able to admit that he lost a war to the mullahs of Iran.” — Paul Krugman

This is the primary sticking point. Trump is not going to withdraw from Iran until he can claim he won. But he has already lost. The link goes to an interview of Paul Krugman by Greg Sargent that I highly recommend. The conversation covers why Trump is stuck in Iran, what that means for petroleum prices and the global economy, and why Wall Street has been slow to realize that we’re in for a long-term disaster here.

Meanwhile, the only reason gas prices haven’t gotten even higher is that reserves are not depleted. But reserves won’t hold out forever. If the Strait stays closed for months and months, which is highly likely as long as Trump is POTUS, we are going to be in for some really interesting times.

The lesson Trump never learned is that maybe you can ignore reality for a while, but reality ain’t gonna ignore you.

You’ve probably heard that Trump is withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, mostly because he’s pissed at Germany for not helping to fix the mess he made in Iran. And Trump continues to believe that the only reason we’re keeping troops in Europe is to protect Europe. He’s too dense to understand how this support the strategic purposes of the U.S. as well. The withdrawal hurts us more than it hurts Germany. Typical.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court just finished off the job these guys couldn’t.

Bloody Sunday – Alabama police attack Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers, 1965.

Kate Riga at TPM:

The Roberts Court finally achieved its years-long goal of killing the Voting Rights Act Wednesday, publishing a ruling that, the liberal justices say, will make proving racial discrimination in redistricting virtually impossible.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent.

“Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic,” she continued. “The majority claims only to be “updat[ing]” our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law…”

This was, of course, a five-to-three decision. Alito wrote the majority decision. Thomas wrote a concurrence. Kagan wrote a dissent. Here’s everything posted on the SCOTUS website.

Edith Olmsted, The New Republic:

The Supreme Court’s decision will not only affect election results in conservative-led Louisiana for years to come, but it has severely undermined the ability of voters to challenge discrimination under the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits “discrimination against the minority group, such as unusually large election districts,” according to a 1982 report from the the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

What’s especially heartbreaking is that the effort to pass the 1965 voting Rights Act was one of the most heroic movements of 20th century America. John Lewis, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson were all at Selma. And they are all gone now. Many had died for the cause in the years before the march. these included Medgar Evers, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Henry Schwerner, and four innocent little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There were many more.

But those insufferable elitist snots on the Supreme Court could just take it away.

Ari Berman at Mother Jones:

The Supreme Court’s six-to-three Republican-appointed majority issued a staggering ruling on Wednesday essentially killing the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act, dealing a death blow to the country’s most important civil rights law. The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Louisiana v. Callais strikes down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana and in so doing narrows Section 2 of the VRA to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color. …

… Justice Elena Kagan forcefully dissented. “I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote,” she wrote. “I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

She added: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks… But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

We came so close to passing the John Lewis Voting Rights bill in 2021. Were it not for Manchin and Sinema, it might have been.

In other news — or just me, venting — Breitbart has a screaming headline saying that North Carolina found 34K dead people on the state voter rolls. Proof of fixed elections! We must pass the SAVE Act Now!!! And I don’t link to Breitbart, but it should be easy to find if you want to read it.

No where in the article does it say that these dead people voted, however. States also keep a record of what elections you vote in, so if any of these dead people had voted after they died the state should be able to see that. But apparently, they’re just dead.

One problem with voter rolls is that there appears to be no automatic mechanism to remove people who have died or moved. I moved from Missouri to New York in 2023; my aunt recently informed me I’d gotten a jury summons from the county in Missouri (she let them know I was unavailable). I was still on the voter rolls. That doesn’t mean I was trying to vote illegally.

Same thing with deaths. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of automatic process that informs county election officials that voters have died. I looked it up and found that states deal with this issue in several ways. In some states, if you haven’t voted for a while your name is automatically removed. A few states attempt to notify the person they’ve been un-registered, but most do not. And then there are at least a few states with no process at all. One assumes that at some point it’s noticed a voter was born in 1892 and hasn’t voted since the 1940s, so he can probably be removed now.

But the fact is that probably all state voter rolls have some dead or moved people on them, and always have, and this by itself it not proof illegal voting is going on. But I’m not even going to try to explain that to a rightie.

This is mostly by Charlie Sykes, but the original article is chopped up by ads and promos. So read at FB:

Trump’s obsession with the ballroom is pathological. I’m reading that he can’t get through a meeting about anything without it turning into a talk about the ballroom. And then there’s this:

“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Sunday morning. “It cannot be built fast enough!”

Top secret? Next he’ll be telling us the ballroom will come with a cloaking device to make it invisible. He has also been talking about moving most Washington functions, including the White House Correspondents Association dinner, to the ballroom. I don’t think the WHCA would agree to that. Maybe they’ll play the Army-Navy game in there, though.

After the Saturday sort-of assasination attempt, the DoJ decided to play hardball.

In a letter posted to social media by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the DOJ pressed for the National Trust for Historic Preservation to drop its “frivolous lawsuit” against the Trump administration after Saturday’s incident, which prompted the evacuation of the president and high-profile administration officials from the gala.

“If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events,” the letter continues.

The National Trust did not withdraw its lawsuit. Late yesterday the DoJ asked a federal judge to lift his order halting construction of the ballroom. Several news stories compared the motion to one of Trump’s rambling Truth Social posts. But I don’t think anything else much has happened.

And be sure to read Paul Waldman, Kick Him Right in the Ballroom.

In other news: James Comey was indicted again, this time for taking a picture of seashells arranged to spell “86 47” and posting it on social media somewhere. Yes, people, that’s how far we’ve fallen. Trump’s DoJ bozos actually got an indictment for that.

The charges, approved by a grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina where Comey allegedly took the photo, include making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, according to court documents.

Update:  Regarding what happened last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner — I wasn’t watching, I haven’t watched the videos, and I have read only a little about it. That said, it strikes me as a tad too choreographed.  I never entirely bought the theory that the Pennsylvania assassination attempt was staged, but I am entertaining the possibility about last night. What better way for a POTUS whose approval ratings are in the toilet to gain public sympathy? Except I doubt it will work. At least no one was killed.

I was in the middle of writing a post about Trump and Iran when I saw this:

No reason was given. There’s no indication they will be replaced. Now on to the main topic:

Trump must be a dreadful poker player, if indeed he has ever played poker. He’s the sort who would draw a third six and go all-in.

So today he pulled this:

President Trump said Saturday he called off plans for U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to travel to Pakistan for Iran peace talks. He cited wasted time and confusion over Iran’s leadership, adding, “we have all the cards.”

“I just cancelled the trip of my representatives going [to] Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with the Iranians,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “Too much time wasted on traveling, too much work!”

“Besides which, there is tremendous infighting and confusion within their ‘leadership,'” he said. “Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”

No, moron, “we” don’t have “all the cards.” They have the Strait of Hormuz. That is at least a straight flush, if not a royal flush. And after wasting so much ordnance to no good effect I’m not sure we even have a full house any more. More like a ten-high straight, at best. And heaven forbid anyone on your team actually did some work to clean up the mess you made. I keep reading Iran believes it can absorb more pain than the U.S. can, so don’t hold your breath waiting for them to call.

I did not know until today that RFK the Lesser rejects germ theory — “the unquestionable scientific idea that specific pathogenic microbes cause specific diseases,” it says here.

As Ars Technica reported last year, Kennedy wrote about his germ theory denialism explicitly in his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci. In it, Kennedy maligns germ theory as a tool of pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and doctors to promote the use of modern medicines. Instead of accepting germ theory, Kennedy promotes a concept akin to the discarded terrain theory, in which diseases stem not from germs, but from imbalances in the body’s inner “terrain.” Those imbalances are claimed to be caused by poor nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins and stressors. (In his book, Kennedy erroneously labels this as “miasma theory,” but that is a different theory that suggests diseases derive from breathing bad air, vapors, or mists from decaying or corrupting matter. The idea was supplanted by germ theory, while terrain theory was never widely accepted.)

There is something seriously wrong with that man. He should probably be in some kind of sheltered or assisted living situation where he can be monitored. I’m serious.

And then I read that Trump is bringing back firing quads for federal executions. Trump is a big believer in executions, apparently. There is no data anywhere showing that the death penalty deters crime.

A new study of more than three decades of FBI homicide data by the Death Penalty Policy Project has found that, after 1,600 executions, the public and police are actually safer in states that don’t have or have recently abolished the death penalty. And, among the death penalty states, the public and police are safer in states that currently have official moratoria on executions or have rarely executed anyone.

Moreover, the states that are now most actively carrying out executions are among the least safe for the public and the most dangerous for police. They have failed to execute their way into violence prevention. From a public safety perspective, the death penalty has been a pointless exercise in cruelty.

The death penalty persists not because it deters crime, but because some people just really want to execute other people. I also understand the DoJ is proposing to expand “death penalty eligible offenses.” Oh, goody.

I understand Witkoff and Kushner are on their way to Iran for new talks. No mention of J.D. Vance. And do see Iran War Has Drained U.S. Supplies of Critical, Costly Weapons by Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan at the New York Times. Trump is squandering our national arsenal of weapons at an alarming rate. Trump also seems to have grown bored with the war and doesn’t want to talk about it.

At The New Republic, see Malcolm Ferguson, Trump’s Latest Truth Social Rampage Proves He’s Hanging On by a Thread. A sample:

Just after midnight, Trump reposted a message from the Border Patrol union calling on “extreme leftist advocate” Senator Chuck Schumer to resign over his recent comments in which he said “nobody respects” ICE or Border Patrol. Just one minute after that, Trump delusionally reposted a random allegation that former President Obama staged a “seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the U.S. government in 2016. He then made four more posts about how Obama and Hillary Clinton should be charged with treason. This was all before 1:00 a.m.

I really am an American history nerd. We’ve had some presidents who were struggling with sub-optimal mental states during their tenure. Franklin Pierce, for example, lost his only child who hadn’t died in infancy — an 11 year old son — in a train accident shortly before his inauguration. He seemed under a cloud and drank too much during his single term. He is blamed tor pushing the nation toward secession and Civil War. In spite of being a northerner he supported slavery and thought the abolitionist movement was dangerous radicalism.  But from all I have read about him he doesn’t seem to have been even half as irrational as Donald Trump.

Heather Cox Richardson writes that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus. CNN reports that the bottom could be falling out in Trump’s polls. The Virginia redistricting referendum passed yesterday. It was close, as polls predicted. But I wonder if it would have passed before Trump decided to go to war with Iran. Ultimately Congress has to ban gerrymandering, both political and racial, and maybe that can happen after 2028, But for now I’m glad to see Dems put up a fight.

Update: See Greg Sargent at The New Republic, How Trump Accidentally Handed Dems Their Big Win in Virginia.

What’s going on with Iran is just a bleeping mess. I understand Iran is seizing ships in the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. is still blockading ports. No talks are going on, last I heard. And I don’t believe Trump and his so-called negotiating team and cabinet flunkies are capable of straightening this mess out.

Do see David Graham, The Aides Keeping the President in the Dark. The Wall Street Journal reported a few days ago that Trump had to be kept out of the room where aides were tracking the efforts to locate and rescue missing airmen. And he had to be kept out of the room because he was hysterical and screaming at everyone and basically just getting in the way. I take it Trump is one of those people who flies off the handle when told bad news. So his aides just don’t bring him bad news, because they’re afraid of his temper. He’s given highly, um, curated news. So he doesn’t know what’s going on, yet he’s in charge of it. “But if the president can’t handle reality, the problem is ultimately with him—not with the information he’s receiving,” Graham writes.

And support for impeaching Trump is growing; see Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers.

Shifting gears a bit — Pentagon Pete has decided that U.S. military personnel needn’t bother about getting an annual flu shot. So let’s hope a war doesn’t start during flu season.

“We’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war-fighting capabilities,” Hegseth said in a video posted to his social media channels. “In this case, this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it.”

Hegseth said that under a new policy, soldiers would be able to take the vaccine if they believed it was in their best interest, billing it as an effort to “restore freedom and strength to our joint force.”

“But we will not force you, because your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable,” he said.

What the actual bleep. This is from The Hill:

He called the flu shot requirement part of “absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our warfighting capabilities.” 

“Our men and women in uniform were forced to choose between their conscience and their country, even when those decisions posed no threat to our military readiness,” Hegseth said of the previous guidelines. “The notion that a flu vaccine must be mandatory for every service member everywhere in every circumstance at all times is just overly broad and not rational.”

Has Hegseth never had the flu? Maybe he did but was too drunk to notice. And the guy who did his Bible study by watching Pulp Fiction has suggested that mandatory vaccines are somehow anti-Christian. The only denominations that discourage vaccines are Christian Science and Dutch Reformed Congregations, and even with those folks it’s not an outright ban.

Personally, I think people who are such pathetic weenies that having to get a flu shot weakens their warfighting capabilities shouldn’t be in the military. And, again, would you rather they got the flu?

I read some letters my Grandpa wrote when he was serving in World War I. While he was still in training somebody in his barracks came down with the measles, and the whole unit was quarantined. It delayed their deployment. (Grandpa had already had the measles, but he wasn’t happy about being cooped up in the barracks.) If vaccination rates fall too low in the military it really could get in the way of deployments. Duh.

Do see George Washington’s Woke Vaccines by Thomas Lecaque at The Bulwark. General Washington mandated smallpox “vaccines” for his troops during the Revolution. The “vaccine” of his day was primitive and genuinely dangerous. Science hadn’t discovered germs yet. But it was known that people who survived smallpox never got it again. So doctors took pus from an active pustule of an infected person, and then inserted that pus into the skin of a non-infected person via a small incision. With luck you’d get a mild case of smallpox that didn’t kill you.

Serious reactions to today’s flu shots are extremely rare. And as Lecaque points out, military personnel are also required to get several other vaccines. Why is Pete singling out flu?

Speaking of measles, I recommend Measles Took My Daughter. This Is What I Want Everyone to Know. by Rebecca Archer in the New York Times (gift link). Measles is much more dangerous than people assume it is. And flu can be dangerous, too. I hate anti-vaxxers.

See also CDC won’t publish report showing covid shots cut likelihood of hospital visits.

Finally, I recommend Quinta Jurecic at The Atlantic, DOJ’s First ‘Weaponization’ Report Is a Bust. The DoJ’s report is on “abuses of the criminal justice process” under the Biden administration.

The report focuses on prosecutions of anti-abortion demonstrators convicted for preventing patients from entering abortion clinics. In the working group’s telling, the Biden administration “unfairly targeted” anti-abortion Christians under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which, much as its name suggests, prohibits blocking entry to facilities that provide reproductive health care. “No Department should conduct selective prosecution based on beliefs,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who stepped into the role after Trump fired Bondi earlier this month—said in a statement about the working group’s findings. CBS reported that the Justice Department had fired at least four prosecutors involved in pursuing those FACE Act cases.

The anti-abortion wackadoos don’t just block access. Some of them have entered clinics during working hours and directly interfered with patient care. And over the years hundreds of abortion clinics have been set on fire, firebombed, and vandalized, and abortion clinic personnel have been assaulted and even shot dead a few times. But according to Trump’s people, trying to protect abortion clinics and their personnel and patients is anti-Christian bias. Right.

Just noting quickly that the U.S. has seized an Iranian cargo ship while preparing for talks. This is from the New York Times:

A U.S. Navy destroyer on Sunday attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship that defied an American blockade of Iran’s ports, President Trump said, posing a fresh threat to the fragile cease-fire that is set to expire this week.

Mr. Trump announced the attack hours after a White House official said the U.S. was dispatching a high-level delegation including Vice President JD Vance to peace talks in Pakistan, even as Iranian state media said Tehran had not yet agreed to a meeting.

What is the bleeping point? Does Trump still think he can bully Iran into whatever it is he’s asking them to do? The Strait was open, but Iran closed it again because of the U.S. Navy blockade.

Update: The story thus far — Late last week it appeared that tensions with Iran were at least de-escalating a bit. There was a cease fire of sorts, although Israel wasn’t abiding by it. Iran said the Strait of Hormuz was open. There was opportunity for more negotiation for whatever Trump wants from the situation, which changes by the hour. But he probably could have gotten something that he could call a win. Things might have settled down, albeit with Iran in a much stronger position than before and continuing to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Well, bleep that. Trump had to escalate the situation for no discernible reason. The U.S. blockade of Iranian ports continued, so Iran closed the Strait again. The U.S. attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship. and now Iran says talks are off. Al Jazeera:

Islamabad, Pakistan – Iran has signaled that it has no plans to send negotiators to Islamabad for a new round of talks with the United States, threatening Pakistan’s plans for multiday negotiations between the warring nations less than 48 hours before a fragile ceasefire is set to expire.

Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said on Monday Washington had “violated the ceasefire from the beginning of its implementation”, citing the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz since April 13, and the overnight capture of an Iranian container ship by the US military as breaches of the truce as well as international law.

He warned that if the US and Israel launched aggression again, Iranian forces “will respond accordingly”, while reaffirming that Tehran’s 10-point proposal, submitted before the first round of Islamabad talks, remained its basis for any negotiation.

“The US is not learning its lessons from experience,” Baghaei said, “and this will never lead to good results.”

The enormous majority of U.S. voters would have been content with gas prices coming back down as a “good result.” Now gas prices are shooting up again. And after this I don’t see Iran opening the Strait again until the U.S. completely withdraws. Which Trump/Hegseth won’t want to do, because that would be an admission of defeat. I suspect we’re at an impasse that could last a while.

Paul Krugman writes that if the Strait remains closed for very much longer — say, another three months — we’re looking at a global recession. It’s already hit Asian countries very hard. See The Forces of Scarcity Hitting Asia May Soon Spread Across the World in the New York Times. It could be a lot like the inflation-inducing shortages during the Covid pandemic, just without the masks and social distancing. And, of course, the entire world will blame the U.S.

Way to go, Donnie.

So the Strait of Hormuz is closed again, I take it. It was open, but as I write this on Saturday evening it’s closed. Iran has fired on some tankers that were underway, thinking they were safe. And this happened because the United States is continuing to blockade the shipping lanes. Why are we blockading the shipping lanes? I have no idea. And the Wall Street Journal is running a headline saying the U.S. is preparing to board Iran-linked ships. I can only read the first paragraph —

The U.S. military is preparing in coming days to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters, according to U.S. officials, expanding its naval crackdown beyond the Middle East.

Why are we doing that? Maybe the WSJ explains it behind the paywall. It makes no sense to me.

Paul Krugman complains that Trump can’t even surrender right.

When you’re losing a war, but it’s not an existential defeat, your country, your government can continue pretty much as before. Aside from the humiliation, there’s a well-established technique, which is to declare victory and pull out. But it appears that Trump can’t even pull that off. …

…The United States has started imposing a blockade on Iran, which hurts the Iranians. It does give them a reason to seek a deal, but only if they get something out of it. So if allowing ships to start carrying oil and LNG and fertilizer and helium out of the Gulf allows them to sell their own oil again and to import food, which apparently is an important issue for Iran, then that’s a deal that can be done. It will, in practice, be a strategic defeat for the United States, but something that the Trump administration could try to spin as a victory.

But in order to get that, you have to actually deliver on that deal. You can claim that you’re winning and that they’re surrendering, not us, but you have to actually deliver on the deal. What Trump tried to do was to say, great, they’re opening up the strait, but meanwhile, we’re going to continue our blockade. And also, they have promised that we can have the uranium, which they had not.

That doesn’t work. It’s just basic logic. Why would the Iranians agree to a deal if they don’t get a lifting of the US embargo, don’t get their ability to sell oil and their ability to import food back? If that’s what’s going to happen, then you might as well keep the strait blocked. So what was this supposed to be? What was the idea? What was the thinking?

Krugman wonders if Trump is able to face the reality that he screwed up and lost a war. I suspect he can’t. IMO the continuing blockade only makes sense if Trump seriously thinks he can still entirely bend Iran to his will if he is just badass enough. He can’t admit he lost.

This is from Politico, published yesterday — Trump keeps claiming victory in Iran. Our new poll shows voters aren’t buying it.

New results from The POLITICO Poll show that support for military action is weak — just 38 percent of Americans back the strikes — and views remain largely unchanged from the days following the joint U.S.-Israel strikes, even as the administration has now had weeks to make its case.

This was predictable. And I don’t see anything happening that will improve public opinion. The best thing for Trump would have been to just accept Iran opening the Strait and withdraw, and maybe try to keep talking to them about the uranium. And then hope that by the midterms voters will have other things on their minds. But no. And more and more voters are finally realizing that Trump is nothing but a big bag of l’excrément, as the French might say.

Elsewhere — you’ve probably heard about the bombshell exposé of Kash Patel at The Atlantic. Here’s a gift link — The FBI Director Is MIA by  Sarah Fitzpatrick. Patel is threatening to sue.

See also Trump seeks ‘resolution’ of his $10bn lawsuit against IRS, spurring concern at Al Jazeera. Yeah, he still expects the IRS to just give him $10 billion. Because he wants it.