Update: Orbán concedes to Magyar’s Tisza after projections show opposition winning two-thirds majority!

The peace talks collapsed in less than 24 hours. Usually negotiations of that nature go on for days, weeks, months even. Now Trump has ordered the U.S. Navy to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social, his social media site. The president also said he had instructed the Navy to interdict all ships that have paid a toll to Iran for traversing the strait, calling Tehran’s expanded control of the waterway “EXTORTION.”

Is there anyone on the planet not named Trump who thinks this is a good idea? I very much doubt it. We’ll be lucky if the moron doesn’t stumble us into World War III.

Trump has also claimed that  “massive numbers” of empty tankers are heading to the U.S. to fill up on oil and gas. He seems to think this is a good thing. But reality and Trump are rarely in the same ball park, so we’ll see if anyone can actually locate these tankers in any real-world sense.

Regarding the negotiations that failed, I saw this on BlueSky yesterday.

.Witkoff and Trump have also made millions through a cryptocurrency deal with Abu Dhabi last year. I suspect Abu Dhabi has some opinions about what’s been going on in the Strait of Hormuz.

Needless to say, no sane nation would send the likes of Kushner and Witkoff to these negotiations. On top of which, the Daily Beast reported this yesterday:

Vice President JD Vance and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner appear to be pushing completely different demands in nuclear talks with Tehran, just a day before negotiations are set to resume.

Regarding Vance, Josh Marshall wrote this yesterday —

I’m no Trumper. I hate what they represent. But I can occasionally appreciate their approach to ritually humiliating their own. In this vein it’s sort of a nice touch that they’ve made JD Vance – who’s been leaking to basically every news outlet that will listen that he was 100% against this war and it’s totally not his fault – own it outright, wrap himself in it really in Pakistan.

Chef’s kiss as they say.

And while that was happening, Trump and his bleeping Secretary of State Marco Rubio were at some pro wrestling match in Miami. While the talks were collapsing.

This is not the way a responsible nation handles a sensitive international crisis. If I were Iran, I wouldn’t trust anything coming out of this administration, either.

Meanwhile, I’m guessing the Veep is spending his free time reading and re-reading the 25th Amendment.

Now for something completely different — I suppose I should say something about Eric Swalwell. I take it he’s pretty much toast. The sexual assault allegations against him appear to be credible, since multiple women came forward and multiple staffers have resigned from his gubernatorial campaign. if such allegations were entirely out of character I doubt the staffers would have resigned.

I remember being way underwhelmed by Swalwell during the 2019 Democratic presidential candidate debates. I gave him the “Mr. Obnoxious Award” after one debate. More recently he’s been on MSNBC quite a bit and seemed to be fighting the good fight. But it’s better this came out now than later, I suppose. I haven’t been paying much attention to the gubernatorial campaigns in California and have no idea how this will impact the election.

Trump may have entered the wounded, cornered animal phase of his second term. Everything he’s touched in his second term is a damn mess — the economy, foreign policy, the bleeping White House and grounds. He’s even managed to make the Iranian regime stronger and the U.S. look weak and stupid — and friendless. Europe Is Done With Appeasing Trump writes Serge Schmemann at the New York Times:

There was a time when Mr. Trump’s stream of insults, falsehoods, expletives, threats and malice would have raised questions among foreign leaders as to whether Mr. Trump was being deliberately obnoxious to achieve a goal — say, to get European allies to pay more for NATO, or as a variant on the “madman theory” strategy devised by President Richard Nixon to convince rivals that the president was dangerously unpredictable. They tried to appease Mr. Trump with praise and pomp, hoping to steer him in a more productive direction.

But more than a year into Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, the Europeans, and much of the world, have concluded that no amount of bowing or scraping will win more than fleeting approval from him. The barrage of tariffs that opened the second Trump administration, aimed indiscriminately at friend and foe; the brazen demands that Denmark cede Greenland to the United States, and now the absence of any consultation with European allies before joining Israel in an attack on Iran that has affected the entire world, have erased any illusion among most Europeans that Mr. Trump is anything but an unpredictable, vindictive and uncontrollable danger. …

… Even Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, one of Mr. Trump’s closest European allies, distanced herself from his seemingly unprecedented threats to Iran this week. “It is crucial to clearly distinguish between the responsibilities of a regime and the fate of millions of ordinary citizens,” she said. That effectively left Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, as Mr. Trump’s most loyal ally in Europe, which explains why Vice President JD Vance was dispatched to prop up Mr. Orban in advance of an election on Sunday that he may well lose. Mr. Orban’s stance on the Iran war, however, is unclear, especially after The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Hungary offered to help Iran in 2024 after Israel caused thousands of pagers belonging to Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, to explode.

Trump doesn’t consult. He doesn’t get prior approval. He just jumps in and does what he wants to do in the moment. It’s how he’s always functioned. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again — he’s never had a real job. He worked for his father, who ran the Trump company as an autocrat, and when Donald took over he ran the company the way his father ran it, making all the decisions alone. It really is just a small family business even though it owns a lot of real estate in several countries. He’s never been part of a business with a multi-level organizational structure responsible for diverse enterprises and product lines. And he’s too stupid to conceptualize what that’s even like. So he’s focused on remodeling the White House and paving over the Rose Garden and putting up stupid giant triumphal arches. He’s even trying to take over some municipal golf courses in the D.C. area to turn them into high-end Country Club-type golf courses. Nobody needed the President of the United States to take over municipal golf courses. Those were the courses for people who can’t afford Country Clubs.

It’s too bad Americans can’t get health care, but that’s not his problem. Let the states do that. He’s got to fight wars and build his ballroom and upgrade golf courses. And watch Fox News. Oh, and write epic Truth Social posts lashing out at former supporters who oppose his war in Iran.  He’s very busy.

So, yeah, he doesn’t really comprehend what his job is. He probably doesn’t appreciate how badly he’s screwing up.

Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner write in the New York Times,

It has been clear for a long time that President Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how his pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.

And may I add, putting Trump in charge of the U.S. military is a bit like butting children in charge of the candy store. It’s become Trump’s favorite toy. And it’s why he wants to pump ghastly amounts of money into it to the detriment of everything else except his remodeling projects,  See Josh Marshall, The New Defense Budget.

You probably heard about the Pentagon meeting that sent a threat to Pope Leo if he doesn’t stop criticizing Trump. Da Pope from Chicago ain’t intimidated. I wrote about it at Patheos and also explain what the Avignon Papacy was and why it was a big deal.

(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.