I’m hearing different things about why Bondi was fired. Much of it points to her failure to get indictments for some of Trump’s prime targets, like Letitia James. The Daily Mail reports that Trump believed Bondi tipped off Eric Swalwell about an FBI investigation about his alleged relationship with a Chinese spy. I don’t know how reliable the Daily Mail might be. As far as prosecuting Trump’s political enemies is concerned, unless and until the entire justice system is corrupted, top to bottom, I doubt another attorney general will do any better than Bondi to make Trump happy.
Update: Eric Swalwell says Bondi didn’t tip him off about anything. He says it was some FBI agents who tipped off reporters that Kash Patel was digging up an old accusation about Swalwell to mess with the California governor’s race.
Update update: I’m also hearing that Bondi is still expected to respond to a subpoena and testify to the House Oversight Committee about Jeffrey Epstein in a couple of weeks. Trump may be sorry he fired her.
It instructs the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.”
The order then “requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List, ensuring that only eligible absentee or mail-in voters receive absentee or mail-in ballots,” according to a White House fact sheet.
Right. The Dems have sued to block it, but of course Trump doesn’t have the constitutional authority to order changes to how elections are run.
What Trump really needs is his Daddy to come along and clean up the mess he made. Barring that, my impression of what he said last night (I didn’t watch, either; I’ve just read about it) is that he’s trying to re-package the mess he made as something he can walk away from and call a win. Let other countries clean up the mess.
This is a long-standing pattern with Trump. When his many business ventures failed he was pretty slick at dumping the debt on his investors and walking away with a profit. His casinos are an example. In brief, Trump got a casino license and a go-ahead to build casinos in Atlantic City in 1982. He borrowed an enormous amount of money at high interest rates to build his casinos. Then he couldn’t make enough profit to pay off the loans. The casinos went through several bankruptcies to stay afloat. At one point Trump’s father sent a lawyer to Atlantic City with orders to buy $3.35 million in chips, and not use them. This was to get Trump some cash to make a loan payment the next day.
During a decade when other casinos here thrived, Mr. Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1.5 billion.
All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts.
As far as Trump was concerned, the casinos were a cash cow. He walked away with a lot of money in his pocket and left the debt to his investors, who lost big-time. Do read the whole article; it’s mind-blowing. And this is just one example. Trump spent his entire business life tap-dancing on the edge of absolute disaster, saving himself through chicanery and cheating and getting bailed out one way or another. And this was the sort of investigative piece that never made it to television news, so most voters didn’t hear about it.
Now Trump bet big on a war in Iran to make him look like a big hero, and instead it’s just turning into a mess. Analyses I’ve read this morning says he came across as sad and tired last night. He’s not the 30-something hotshot he was when he got the Casino license. He doesn’t have the energy for all that tap-dancing now. He wants out. He’s probably just waiting for an optimum moment for getting out, a moment in which his getting out won’t look so much like an obvious defeat.
Of course, we’re still talking about Trump, in over his head and struggling with dementia. Something in his brain could always turn sideways and persuade him to escalate.
First off, let me warn you I’m still feeling under the weather and suffering a lot of brain fog. But I’ll do my best.
Today is Birthright Citizenship Day. The SCOTUS is hearing arguments on the challenge to Birthright Citizenship as I keyboard.
Trump showed up this morning and is sitting in the front row, no doubt glowering at the justices to let them know they’d better come to the right conclusion. Steve M compares it to the scene in Godfather II when “Vincenzo Pentangeli was brought in from Sicily to intimidate his brother Frank when Frank was a cooperating congressional witness against crime boss Michael Corleone.” I am nearly certain no sitting POTUS has ever attended Supreme Court arguments about anything. It is, of course, grossly inappropriate.
Over a year ago I wrote a post about United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), which is the case that would be overturned if the Court sides with Trump. The Heritage Foundation appears to be the origin of the current argument against it, but Heritage’s arguments don’t square with the plain language in Kim Jong Ark. In a nutshell, Kim was born in California to parents who were “subjects of the Emperor of China,” the court decision clearly says. But the status of his parents didn’t matter to Kim’s citizenship claims. He was born in the state of California, so he was a U.S. citizen.
The Heritage foundation is trying to fuzzy up the meaning of “jurisdiction” in the 14th Amendment. But even the bleeping Reason site is running a column explaining that the “jurisdiction” clause just refers to being under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. If you are born within the jurisdiction of U.S. laws, you’re a citizen. The exception would be if you are born to a diplomat who has diplomatic immunity to U.S. laws. And at the time the 14th was written it didn’t apply to native American reservations, which were outside U.S. laws, but that was fixed later by U.S. statute.
I have not been listening to the oral arguments, but from reading some live blogs (for example) it seems nobody is placing bets on how the SCOTUS will come down.
Also, am I crazy, or does it seem that most of the people who are leading the ccharge to end birthright citizenship are only first and second generation themselves? Trump? Miller? Marco Rubio, for pity’s sake? It’s like they just got off the boat and they want to burn the pier.
Donald Trump has lost his Iran war. He is the Iranian hostage. Unlike the US embassy personnel captured as hostages for 444 days, Trump threw himself into Iranian hands. Less than a month into his “short-term excursion”, his stated objectives have been scattered to the winds. There is no regime change, no uprising and no access to oil wealth along the Venezuelan model. The decapitation gambit – assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian leadership – has failed to destroy the regime. Despite the massacre, it is Trump who stands exposed to slings and arrows for the rashest military adventure since Custer at the Little Bighorn.
Trump hasn’t figured this out, of course. He is still publicly musing about what he might do next. Maybe he’ll take Kharg Island. Maybe he’ll take Iran’s oil (what does that even mean?). He says negotiations (that Iran says aren’t happening) are going well and is threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s energy facilities if they won’t make a deal.
If there is any consistency to Trump’s policy, it is a series of frantic attempts to justify his original blunder and extricate himself from its dire consequences. His latest 15-point proposal to the Iranians has dispensed with regime change and focuses instead on restarting the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program that he unilaterally broke off. He wishes to trade that in exchange for opening the strait. “Mission accomplished” would apparently be to return to square one, where things stood before he careened into war. The Iranians, however, deny there are any negotiations and have rejected his latest offer “until complete victory”.
It’s hard to know how much Iran has been damaged. Some fella on the teevee today said that Iran has used only about a third of its missiles and drones. I don’t know if that’s true, but I guess it could be. If Trump escalates the war in an effort to grasp at something he can call a win, I fear we’re going to see slaughters of U.S. troops and the burning of U.S. warships eventually.
Right now Iran holds the initiative in the whole conflict. And the president is escalating but without any goal or off-ramp that isn’t under Iran’s control to give or deny. Sometimes you simply have to admit you got it wrong and try to redefine goals that are workable. But the president appears to be on the brink of a severe escalation, banking on the hope that blowing up more things will take the initiative back from Iran when that seems highly unlikely.
Someone last week used the term “escalation spiral.” Most of us can see it. Many of us can remember when escalation in Vietnam didn’t get us a “win,” either. This is folly of the highest order. I would think members of the Republican party would be trying to tell Trump to wind things down, not jack them up. Yet they’re thinking of cutting Medicaid and ACA subsidies even more than they did last year to pay for Trump’s bleeping war. They’re that afraid of him. And Trump is still saying that Cuba is “next.”
President Trump is prioritizing taking control of the Strait of Hormuz as he grows frustrated with the lack of help from allies to force open the crucial waterway. And once Trump ends Iran’s reign of terror over the shipping route, he’s considering rechristening it the “Strait of America” or even naming it after himself, sources told The Post.
“We are taking the Strait back. It’s guaranteed, and they will never blackmail us on that strait,” one senior administration official said. “You can take it to the bank.”
While Trump said Iran is virtually decimated and wants to make a deal, he wants to finish the job in the Middle East — including ensuring Iran can no longer stop shipping and claim authority over the Strait of Hormuz.
This was published Friday. At the time the plan seems to have been for the U.S. to seize that part of Iran that controls the strait and occupy it indefinitely. Whether that’s still his plan I cannot say. What I can say is that seizing that much territory will require ground troops and could easily be a bloodbath.
I’m reading that Iran is still engaging in missile and drone strikes. Their military capabilities have not, in fact, been obliterated. Does Trump comprehend this? I am not sure that he does.
I did go to a No Kings event yesterday. It was very cold, and I got very chilled. And now i have the mother of all head colds. So I am going to stop now and blow my nose for a while.
I have time for only a short comment. It’s my grandson Dylan’s tenth birthday. I understand there will be festivities involving pizza and cake.
Trump and the Senate have caved on DHS funding. The Senate voted this morning to fund the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and most of the rest of DHS, but not ICE. In other words, what the Democrats have been asking for for forty-something days. Trump also signed an executive order asking for TSA agents to be paid, but I’m not sure he can do that. Congress does that. Now it’s up to the House, but if Trump wants it, the measure will be approved, I suspect.
This week’s horrific accident at LaGuardia and the four-hour lines at airport security — which ICE agents didn’t shorten — must have had the major airlines screaming at Trump and legislators. People were probably canceling flights, or not booking them at all. Pressure from major corporations is about the only pressure that means anything to Republicans.
Regarding Iran, I understand Trump has extended his five-day deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. At this point I suspect he wants out of the war more than Iran does. The thing with authoritarian regimes is that they aren’t worried about being re-elected and can accept a lot of hurt. Trump can’t. People are pissed. U.S. military assets are being obliterated along with Iranian infrastructure. The price of oil is going through the roof. Trump has got to be hearing from a lot of the Money People that he needs to extract the U.S. from this war, asap. He needs a TACO that he can sell to what’s left of his base as a win. Good luck with that.
And did you hear that Treasury is going to start issuing paper bills with Trump’s signature on them? How tacky is that? “Adding his name to U.S. currency is Trump’s latest effort to leave his mark on the federal government in ways other presidents haven’t,” the linked article says. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that what he does can all be undone by a future administration. Unless he’s completely destroyed something, like the East Wing. I do hope he lives long enough to see his stupid ballroom demolished.
In his remarks Trump didn’t say that gift was for the U.S., just that he received a gift worth a tremendous amount of money. But he can’t tell us what it is. Probably there is no such gift; he was being backed into a corner by a reporter asking how can he make a deal with Iran if he doesn’t trust Iran, and this is the answer that popped out of Trump’s mouth — they want to make a deal so much they sent this amazing gift I can’t talk about. Riiiight. He’s like a child being asked what happened to the cookies. The Constitution says the POTUS cannot accept gifts from foreign entities without the consent of Congress, which I assume means he has to at least tell Congress what it is, assuming it’s not a fantasy gift. Today Iran has nixed whatever peace proposal Trump sent them, showing how eager they are to make a deal..
But the larger point is that if this had been any other president, media would have been all over this statement for being unhinged. It would have been a scandal for the ages. But with Trump, it’s just Tuesday. Nothing to see here.
This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.
This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.
When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”
Let’s see, what else — MS NOW got hold of some memos from the House Judiciary Committee. apparently related to Jack Smith’s recent behind-closed-doors testimony. It revealed that the FBI believed that Trump’s primary motive for hanging on to the documents was financial They noticed many documents had information that might have impacted Trump’s businesses.
“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to the memo, which tracked progress in the documents and election-interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”
In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, Raskin insisted that Trump’s Justice Department has sought to cover up the details of Trump’s “hoarding” of classified government secrets and storing them in his Mar-a-Lago club’s showers and closets — which put national security at risk — as well as the clues to Trump’s motives for doing so.
“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests,” Raskin wrote to Bondi.
“This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”
Smith also connected lots of dots between Trump’s key allies in Congress and the plot to steal the 2020 election. I expect we’ll be hearing more about this unless Trump nukes Tehran or invades Cuba to distract us.
When his ignorance is exposed, Trump claims that he couldn’t have known what he didn’t know, because nobody knew it. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he said in amazement in 2017 when he realized how hard it would be to keep his promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare; in fact, everyone knew how complicated it was — everyone except him.
And this happens over and over and over. Now he’s claiming “nobody knew” that Iran would respond to being bombed as it did — attacking neighbors, closing the Strait of Hormuz, etc. — when in fact there was all kinds of analysis going back years that predicted this was exactly what Iran would do. Which is why other Presidents left Iran alone. Oh, and it’s probably he case he has little idea what’s really going on in Iran now except for watching videos of U.S. bombs falling and going BOOM.
Now see Jamelle Bouie, When a Narcissist Goes to War. “If you can set aside both the unconstitutionality and the immorality of President Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran and focus on the operation itself,” Bouie writes, “it is hard not to be bewildered by the utter lack of real planning, or even basic strategic thinking, that has gone into it.” Trump believed that all he had to do was drop some bombs and the government of Iran would collapse. Easy peasey. Now that it hasn’t, he’s winging it, not knowing what to do or how to explain why he is doing it. And now he’s caught in an escalation spiral he doesn’t know how to stop..
What’s striking is how familiar this pattern feels. The administration did not expect the public to be repelled by DOGE. It did not expect outrage over the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It did not expect Democrats to respond to threats of partisan gerrymandering with their own push to wring as many Democratic seats as possible out of so-called blue states. The administration certainly did not expect the mass mobilizations against the deployment of National Guard troops and the use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving paramilitary force. Minnesota in particular appears to have caught them entirely off guard — a tendency toward docility, it seems, is their base-line assumption about everyone they oppose.
Which raises another key question: Why can’t the White House see what others could easily predict?
Bouie’s answer is that he fundamentally doesn’t grasp that other people are, well, people.
Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. He is a consummate narcissist, and he is, without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds.
By this Bouie means that from Trump’s perspective, everything his him, and whatever else goes on in the world is either for him or against him or irrelevant. And he assumes everyone agrees with him and is baffled when they don’t. In the past he at least had his fingers on the pulse of popular opinion enough to know what to offer people to get elected. But over the past several months he’s shown an utter indifference even to his own supporters and what they want from him.
So let’s see where we are — on Saturday night, Trump gave Iran 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz — I’m not sure if he’s still spelling is “straight” — or he’d “obliterate” all their power plants. But on Sunday night he announced that he and Iran have been having lovely talks, and he’s decided to pause the war for five days in hopes of getting things resolved. “Resolved” probably looks a lot like the status quo before the war began, except with new and more radicalized leadership in Iran.
However, the BBC reports, Iran says no such talks have taken place. So either Trump is hallucinating or he’s playing his usual game of one-dimensional checkers with only the red pieces. Iran state television announced that “Trump backed down.” And note that Israel is still on the attack.
I’m seeing speculation from journalists on Bluesky that Trump may be trying to calm the markets and buy time until the Marines can get there. Also, “unnamed sources” are telling Israeli media that ending hostilities while the Strait of Hormuz is still closed would amount to a strategic surrender, according to somebody on Bluesky. So take all that with several grains of salt. I don’t know how accurate it is.
Of course, it’s very possible that by noon today he’ll forget he asked for a pause and order more bombing.
Paul Krugman says there are three reasons to believe Trump is just making stuff up about the talks:
First, he put himself in a very bad spot with his threat to commit a massive war crime if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. and must be looking for a way out. Another president at another time might say that on careful consideration, We have recalibrated the policy or something like that. Trump doesn’t do that. Trump is always winning, never admits that he’s had a setback, never admits that he’s changed his mind.
So saying that, oh, the Iranians have come to the table, probably big, strong Iranians with tears in their eyes, but anyway, that the Iranians have come to the table and that’s why we’re not doing what I said we would do is a very Trumpian out.
Second, Why would the Iranians be making a deal at this point? We can talk a lot about how the war is going, but it’s pretty clear that as the Iranians are likely to see it, they’re winning. I mean, they’re not winning militarily, but that was never on the cards. They are, they have successfully turned what was supposed to be a lightning decapitation of their government into a protracted contest in relative ability to bear pain and all indications are that the Iranians are nowhere near cracking and all indications are that the United States, although obviously we’re not losing thousands of people, and we are having our whole life disrupted, but the American public really doesn’t like higher gas prices, does not believe Trump. The clock is ticking for Trump on this in a way that it is apparently not for the Iranian regime. So Iran has has the upper hand here. And very hard to see why they would be wanting to make a deal until they basically humiliated us substantially more.
Finally, consider possible motives. Imagine that you were somebody close to Trump, somebody close enough to actually have an influence on his decisions as well as inside knowledge. Here’s what you could have done really just between last night and now. You could have sold a bunch of crude oil futures, at very high prices, Brent was over $112 over the weekend, then bought them back immediately after Trump’s announcement of triumphal progress, but before the Iranians said that is not happening. And you could have turned a very, very nice, very large profit.
To say that insider trading might be driving U.S. policy would have been outrageous. in the past. Who thinks that that’s beyond the realm of possibility now? So all of this could be happening.
Makes as much sense as anything else.
Yesterday there was a thoughtful piece in the New York Times by Phil Klay headlined Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran. After listing the Regime’s ever-changing reasons for the war with Iran, Klay wrote,
And yet, as I watched a video posted by the White House in which a group of angry, rifle-wielding bowling pins labeled “Iranian Regime Officials” are struck by a Stars and Stripes bowling ball that turns into an airplane, followed by actual combat footage of U.S. airstrikes, I realized how one rationale for this war has remained clear and consistent: the administration’s delight in displays of violence and domination.
Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog wrote a post about Klay’s op-ed, and it’s very good and pretty much says what I wanted to write about it. So he saved me the trouble.
And then there’s Cuba. I haven’t been talking about Cuba. I should have been. See Trump’s Eye Is Already on Cuba at The Atlantic. Trump’s next project is to topple the government of Cuba.
The Trump administration is squeezing Cuba to a breaking point—and is seemingly willing to engage in a high-seas stand-off that has pronounced Cold War echoes. Donald Trump’s goal appears to be to install more amenable leadership in Havana. Last week, he told reporters at the White House that he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking Cuba,” adding: “Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want with it.” …
…Trump is less fixated on regime change or forcing an ideological shift away from communism than on securing broad U.S. latitude to invest, develop, and ultimately capitalize on Cuba’s underdeveloped cities and beaches, people familiar with his thinking told us.
“The Trump administration is going to put Cuba into Chapter 11,” John Kavulich, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, told us, referring to the section of the bankruptcy code that companies use for a financial reorganization while still in operation. “It’s not going to be Chapter 7 liquidation. It’s going to be Chapter 11—a country reorganization. But the whole focus is business.”
Cubans are suffering food as well as fuel shortages, so I question whether this move is winning any hearts and minds there.
Update: Looks like Krugman was right about the insider trading.
By now you’ve heard that Robert Mueller died, and that Trump said he was glad Mueller was dead. What a clod. See Donald Trump Is Nothing Like Robert Mueller by Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic.
I also see that the Regime is planning to send ICE agents to airports starting tomorrow to “help” people get through security faster. I haven’t heard what the airlines think of that idea. I’m glad I’m not planning to fly anywhere.
So today’s topic is why the rich won’t leave New York City to avoid paying Mayor Mamdani’s proposed taxes on their wealth. The Right is certain that all the ultra-wealthy are already moving out of NYC to avoid the taxes, and without their tax money the city will collapse, and Mayor Mamdani will fail. They are only too eager to see him fail. Social media is swarming with concern trolls tut-tutting that New Yorkers made a big mistake by electing him, and they’ll be sorry.
But New Yorkers have been through this before. Just about every time there’s any new policy or tax proposal for NYC there are predictions the rich will leave, and take their money with them, but they never do. And now I will explain why.
In brief, New York has some unique tax laws. It isn’t good enough to buy another home in Miami, declare it to be your primary residence, and even spend more than half the year there. If you keep your New York City residence and are there for any time at all, New York tax auditors will still come after you with tax bills. And they’ll probably win. Further, even if you’re never in New York City, if you are receiving earned income from a New York City business you still owe New York City taxes.
This is a fact of life for New Yorkers. When you file state taxes, you have to check boxes declaring you earned income in either New York City or Yonkers. If you do you have to declare that income and pay NYC or Yonkers taxes, even if you don’t live in NYC or Yonkers.
From the article:
For decades in New York City, pundits, business leaders and the uber-wealthy have warned of a looming exodus among its richest residents — driven, they claim, by the city’s progressive politics or the suggestion of tax increases. …
… But it’s one thing to threaten to leave. It’s another to follow through.
According to tax lawyers and financial planners who advise the city’s upper echelon, many wealthy New Yorkers who want to avoid taxes by moving are often unwilling to go to the lengths required to pass auditors’ scrutiny.
Their lives are deeply woven into the city, where they have networks of family, friends, medical care and social activities, and those ties would have to be significantly curtailed or severed entirely. Moving would uproot not just their lives but also those of their family members, including children, who would have to be enrolled in new schools.
Kenneth T. Zemsky, a tax lawyer whose clients have included Martha Stewart, said that in his decades of practice, for every 10 people who have inquired about leaving New York, about one has ended up actually doing so.
If you are wealthy and try to claim you moved out of state, “Auditors demand reams of information — cellphone records, credit card receipts, E-Z Pass logs, diary entries — that could support or disprove a change-of-residency claim.” If you still have significant ties to NYC, the tax auditors will probably decide you still owe New York City taxes. They will even check out your new out of state residence to find out if it’s more modest than your NYC one, which they consider a red flag.
So while hand-wringers on Fox News may be declaring that the wealthy have already cleared out of the city, few actual NYC residents believe it. There is as yet no indication from the real estate people that the wealthy are selling their New York City homes, which they would probably have to do to avoid the tax.
Elsewhere: Scott Bessent says the administration doesn’t really need the extra $2 billion it’s asking for to fight in Iran.
Yesterday Trump made an ass of himself once again by making a Pearl Harbor joke while meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan. The world cringed. And I just read that Trump is asking advisors how to get his birthday declared a national US holiday. He’s got the mind of a spoiled, bratty child.
Jason Linkins wrote at The New Republic, “Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. One look, and here’s what you should be thinking: ‘Yep, that tracks.'”
Republicans in Congress are still afraid to cross him. The Department of Justice is pursuing a hairbrained “grand conspiracy” theory, based on nothing but signals from Trump’s brain and vibes on the Internet, that targets a list of people Trump considers his enemies. Meanwhile, the price of oil is going to be high and higher for the foreseeable future, certainly well past the Midterms. Even if Trump were to pull U.S. military assets out of the war tomorrow, much damage has been done that will take a long time to fix. And Iran is unlikely to allow traffic through the Strait of Hormuz without big concessions from the U.S. and Israel.
After the 2024 elections Republicans tried to make a scandal out of a “coverup” of Joe Biden’s alleged dementia. Biden certain was growing very frail, but I don’t think he was nearly as mentally addled as Trump. The Republicans should answer for this.
Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.
He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.
Applebaum describes Trump’s shabby treatment toward our long-time allies these past several months. I read today that Denmark was planning to destroy Greenhand’s runways if Trump sent an invasion force. And now he demands those allies clean up his mess.
NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.
But the NATO cavalry isn’t coming.
This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.
As I’ve written before, he was never exceptionally bright, and he’s clearly psychologically miswired. Probably he’s been miswired since childhood. And now he’s making one colossally bad decision after another, because he’s a sloppy thinker with no patience for complexity. As I wrote a few days ago, his administration would be a great deal more successful if he’d done absolutely nothing but show up in the Oval Office now and then wearing a nice suit. He could even have his tacky gold crap all over the Oval Office walls; just leave the East Wing and Jackie’s Rose Garden alone. But no.
The commander in chief was reportedly told that the mullahs might not agree to go gently into the night, but he seems to have waved away such concerns because he was so convinced that the Iranian regime would collapse almost immediately. According to The Wall Street Journal, when General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned the president that a U.S. attack would prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, Trump “told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.”
Anyone who is even a casual reader of military history recognizes the pattern. So many wars have been started by an aggressor who assumed a quick victory that didn’t happen. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Trump now appears lost, unable to comprehend how a blockbuster movie that he scripted out, one in which he cast himself as the Liberator of Iran, has turned into a poorly received miniseries that might yet be renewed for another dreary season.
He still seems full of bluster I fear he’s going to keep doubling down, sending more troops and military assets into the war until he can claim a “win.” Experts on the teevee are saying it will require ground troops to open the Strait. Reminds me of Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam, which turned out to be a major escalation — that didn’t end the war In Vietnam.
