Phillips O’Brien (no relation I know of) is an American historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He was formerly at the University of Glasgow where he ran the Scottish Centre for War Studies. And this is what Professor O’Brien thinks of Trump’s cease fire deal.

Donald Trump yesterday showed how few cards the USA had to play in his war of choice, when he went from threatening to destroy Iranian people, culture and history, to agreeing to a two-week ceasefire and talks based on an Iranian ten point plan. The details of this plan (see below) amount to a comprehensive US defeat. If this indeed is the end of the war and that Iranian plan is the basis of a deal, it makes this if not the longest war in US history, the most pointless and a complete waste. Iran looks on the verge of emerging stronger, with the ability to generate massive new income, while the US looks, in a word, a busted flush.

This is no run of the mill TACO. This is complete US strategic failure.

Last night I was reading contradictory reports on the status of the Strait of Hormuz. I’m reading now that it’s still not safe until everyone has agreed to new protocols. Even whenever the Strait is safe I’m reading that it will be months before oil production is back to where it was, so there will be less oil on the world market for a while. And Iran wants control of the Strait from now on, which it didn’t have before. It plans to charge a fat fee $2 million a ship — for passage through it’s strait.

Iran state media published the ten-point plan that it says will be the basis of negotiations. Professor O’Brien calls them Iran’s “victory terms.” Do read O’Brien’s entire post; it will catch you up better than I can.

And then Trump promptly said that wasn’t the same list of ten points he agreed to yesterday, but he wouldn’t say what those other points were. Probably he just doesn’t remember what he was told yesterday. The cease fire doesn’t seem to be entirely holding, but I don’t think Pete Hegseth has bombed anybody today. But it looks like Trump will get nothing he wanted. Iran, on the other hand, will come out of this much stronger and more feared. See also A New Geopolitical Reality Is Here by Thomas Wright at The Atlantic and Ignorance and Ignominy by Paul Krugman.

Of course, we don’t know how this episode will end. Trump could throw a fit tomorrow and go back to threatening to destroy Iran. I don’t know if Trump realizes even now how badly he screwed up. Most Republicans in Congress are unlikely to do anything to rein him in. Yet. When they get closer to the midterms and they are facing an electoral abyss they may change their minds.

This episode also demonstrates that The World’s Biggest Military Power is no stronger than the intelligence of the people leading it. With Trump and Hegseth in charge, it’s clear we’d be better off with less military and more smarts. It’s the U.S. that’s looking like a paper tiger right now.

(Update: The New York Times is reporting that Trump and Iran have agreed to a two-week cease fire. So no nuclear Armageddon tonight.)

Stealing a subhead from David Kurtz — Go Big or Go TACO?

Of course, the part about regime change and “less radicalized minds” isn’t true, according to all the media, but does Trump believe it’s true? What is he being told?

The threat is supposed to be carried out beginning at 8 pm Eastern Time. And it has been well and truly said that Trump runs his administration as if it were a reality TV show. Tune in tonight to see what happens next. I feel so bad for Iranians who are probably wondering where to put their children to keep them safe right now. This is ghastly. Paul Waldman:

If you are reading this after Tuesday, April 7, you know how it turned out, at least in the short run. But until then, this is the situation: Because he loves attaching a deadline to a threat in order to create a ticking clock that heightens dramatic tension and encourages viewers to tune in to the next episode, Trump has told Iran that if it doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 pm eastern time, then he will destroy all the country’s power plants and bridges. But that alone wouldn’t obliterate Iranian “civilization” for all time. For that, you’d need nuclear bombs.

And that’s about the fourth mention of nuclear bombs I’ve seen today. With any other POTUS, that’s not something we’d have to worry about. With him, it is.

Despite all we’ve been through, I doubt Trump would actually nuke Iran and kill all its 92 million citizens. But I’m not 100% sure he wouldn’t, and neither is anyone else. This is one of the most horrifying things: When Trump is told that his current plans would make him a war criminal, that may make him even more likely to raise the stakes higher, bring more destruction, kill more people, and cause more global instability.

Part of him wants to be praised as a peacemaker, to have everyone say he stopped fifty-seven wars and finally get that Nobel Peace Prize. But another part of him yearns to be the destroyer of worlds.

Waldman goes on to the relationship among Trump, Stephen Miller, and Pete Hegseth. IMO these three apparent sociopaths are the current Axis of Evil. They recognize nothing but force and dominance and no doubt get off on carnage, especially against nonwhite people. And they have no appreciation of history and honor. Waldman’s point is that explaining war crimes to Trump made him more likely to do those things. He wants to believe he has absolute power now.

See also Paul Krugman, Our Darkest Hour (the civilization we destroy may be our own).

Recently Trump admitted something I’ve suspected all along, that Trump got his “understanding” of NATO from Putin. It’s at the beginning of this bit —

See also Steve Benen at Maddowblog. Trump basically doesn’t understand what NATO even does, such as why the NATO charter doesn’t require anybody to bail him out of a war he started in Iran. Trump can’t lawfully withdraw the U.S. from NATO without congressional approval, and I assume this has been explained to him. But I take it NATO is preparing for a post-U.S. future anyway.

At the New York Times, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman have a long feature on how Trump decided to take the U.S. to war in Iran. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks interesting.

This hasn’t much gotten into the news, what with everything else going on. But in what may have been one of Pal Bondi’s last initiatives, the Department of Justice issued a memo last week declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. Trump can keep all the records he wants when he leaves office, apparently.

The OLC says that the law unconstitutionally regulates presidential conduct and threatens to “impede” the presidency in the way “constrains the President’s day-to-day operations.”

Congress, the opinion says, lacked a “valid legislative purpose” in passing it, suggesting that lawmakers could never have “legitimate” reason to study the internal workings of the White House.

The opinion also said the relevant constitutional clause allows Congress only to pass laws that boost the presidency, and that Congress cannot pass laws that constrain the presidency.

Politico:

The Wednesday memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which challenges the Presidential Records Act, appears intended to give President Donald Trump the legal leeway to destroy White House records from his current term. It also gives him legal backing to refuse to hand over any remaining records to the National Archives and Records Administration when he leaves office in 2029.

The Politico article has some good information on how presidential records are handled by the National Archives. For example:

White House records typically begin to trickle out five years after a president leaves office, when the Archives begins accepting public requests for them. Due to backlogs and a provision in the law that lets presidents withhold some sensitive advice for 12 years after they leave office, the flow of records often begins to pick up in earnest a decade or more after their term ends. 

I’m struggling to understand how this “impedes” a sitting administration.

It seems to me that presidential records, including all work product of an administration, ultimately belong to We, the People, not to the presidents. They need to be preserved for history. It’s also not impossible that a lot of those records contain information that later administrations might need. For example, in dealing with a foreign crisis it might be handy to know exactly what it was the last administration actually did regarding that crisis.

And, yeah, sometimes Congress really does have a legitimate need to know about the “internal workings” of the White House.

Of course, it’s likely that a lot of those records contain information that could be incriminating to Trump, and he’s just being sure it never sees the light of day. This memo most likely will be nixed by a future administration. But in the meantime I hope somebody is challenging it and that whenever Trump leaves office there’s somebody making sure he doesn’t take anything with him that isn’t legitimately his.

Latest on Iran — I understand that in the Wednesday night address that I refused to watch, Trump announced that Iran wanted a cease fire. Apparently not all that much. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that peace talks being led by Pakistan had reached a dead end. See Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling at The New Republic, Iran Abruptly Shuts Down Peace Talks Due to Trump’s Demands. I understand that on Truth Social today, Trump was promising that “all hell” will rain down on Iran tomorrow.

I don’t believe Trump has spoken publicly about the missing fighter jet crewman.  Well, except to say he can’t comment on it. And it seems to me that Iran has Trump by his little boy parts. I’d enjoy it except that people are dying. See also Laura Rozen, Watching the strange spectacle of Trump committing political suicide.

Budget Blues. Trump wants Congress to pass a budget that is all guns, no butter. Huge military spending, to be paid for (a little) by more cuts in health care and other social services. Also big cuts to science research. But he’s asking for more money for executive residence renovations. Even House Republicans may balk at this. Getting re-elected in November was hard enough already.

And here’s the unedited video the White House doesn’t want you to see.L

Trump’s poll numbers are sinking into Katrina territory.

I saw a headline that asked, Is Iran Trump’s Katrina? Frankly, I think Trump is his own Katrina. He’s making one ghastly unforced error after another. Last year he got lucky there was a fairly quiet hurricane season. He may not be that lucky this year. And he’s got no plan to get out of Iran.

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.

But even as the casinos were failing, Trump was drawing a big salary for himself. See How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions, published in the New York Times back in 2016.

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.

For more analyses:

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, Trump Mini-Speech: the Definitive Reax

Paul Krugman, Trump Doesn’t Even Have the Courage to Run Away

Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech

Associated Pres,  FACT FOCUS: False claims Trump made as he addressed the nation about Iran

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.

Sydney Blumenthal in The Guardian:

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.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are considering cutting more funds from healthcare to pay for Trump’s war. A war that is way unpopular, btw. Do these people want to be wiped out in the midterms?

See Josh Marshall, Lacking Any Strategy, Trump Prepares to Escalate.

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.”

What Trump really cares about, of course, is the ballroom. Do see the New York Times article showing the current ballroom design is a mess. And now Trump is saying there will be a massive military complex under the ballroom. Golly.

See also Greg Sargent, Pete Hegseth Just Revealed the Real Roots of His Sadism and Rage. It’s disturbing.

This is an actual headline from the New York Post:

From the article:

To the victor go the naming rights.

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.