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.

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— Kat Denise (@katpic57.bsky.social) March 23, 2026 at 6:35 PM

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.

See Rich New Yorkers Threaten to Leave. Then They Find Out How Hard That Is. by Matthew Haag in the New York Times, published in December.

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:

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.

Anne Applebaum wrote at The Atlantic,

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.

I recommend Trump Had No Plan B for Iran by Tom Nichols at The Atlantic.

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.

Meanwhile, Politico is reporting Putin offers to stop sharing intel with Iran if US cuts off Ukraine. Trump probably still thinks Putin is his friend.

Trump and his FCC chair Brendan Carr are threatening U.S. news sources with loss of broadcast licenses or worse because their Iran War coverage makes Trump’s Folly out to be what it is, a mismanaged mess. It’s my understanding that broadcast licenses only apply to, um, broadcasts, and not to cable or Internet media. But as Trump doesn’t trust anything he can’t control, he seems to be aiming at taking over the Fourth Estate.

Trump spent much of Friday and Saturday attacking news organizations as well. He shared an infographic on Truth Social titled “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” cataloguing the departures of prominent journalists and TV anchors under a section labeled “Gone,” which also includes “massive layoffs” at The Post.

And don’t forget the media consolidation issue. Something I wrote last year:

On to the bigger crisis, which is media consolidation. Behind the Kimmel firing is a bigger story about how nearly all of our media are being gobbled up by a few right-wing rich people. Corporate ownership of media has been an issue for a while, but there has been a standing FCC regulation that prevented any single entity is from owning television stations that, in total, reached more than 39% of all U.S. TV households. Look for that to be eliminated soon, to allow right-wing media to control much more of the nation’s televised news. And then there’s David Ellison, a very rich right-wing guy who already controls Skydance and Paramount and is gunning for a lot more stuff, including streaming companies. We’re going to be hearing a lot about media consolidation going forward.

See also Media consolidation is shaping who folds under political pressure — and who could be next from Poynter.

The media consolidation thing is a serious worry.

There’s nothing new about contentious relationships between news media and public figures, including presidents. Even President George Washington got bad press sometimes, although he kept his thoughts about media criticism of his administration private. John Adams famously signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Acts forbade “False, scandalous, and malicious” writing against the government, Congress or president, or any attempt “to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition.” But the Acts were enormously unpopular and were a big reason Adams was a one-term president. .The Acts were written with sunset clauses and were allowed to expire.

Most 19th century newspapers were openly partisan, and back then journalism was not known to have ethical standards. The 20th century saw the rise of investigative journalism in the form of “muckraking.” Reporters began to see themselves as professionals with scruples and a duty to report the truth. Eventually they were represented by such figures as Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

But now it all seems to be falling apart, for a lot of different reasons. IMO part of the reason the nation is in such a mess right now is that we are short of broadly respected figures who did what Murrow did in 1954, when he used his CBS platform to show his viewers what a fraud Sen. Joe McCarthy really was. Murrow wasn’t the only journalist to go after McCarthy, and it took the televised Army-McCarthy hearings to finally bring McCarthy down. But it was a glorious thing when it happened.

So what changed? How come journalism isn’t bringing down Donald Trump? A lot has changed, actually.

It so happens that 1954 was the first year more than half of U.S. households had television, and with not a lot of programming options we can assume a large part of those households watched Murrow. One television broadcast could make a huge difference. The nightly lineup on MSNOW routinely lays bare Trump’s many failures in all their perfidy, but the people who really need to see it aren’t watching. There are so many other choices.

In some ways I think some parts of the news business are devolving back into what it was in the 19th century — partisan and unreliable — but with updated tech. But see more about partisan bias below.

One other thing occurs to me. Maybe, at least, some news directors and editors are having second thoughts about treating Trump so carefully and gently, cleaning up his garbled prose in quotes and making him sound more intelligent than he is. They let him get away with howlers that would have sunk other politicians. But why?

One of my earliest memories of watching news was watching what journalism did to President Lyndon Johnson. It was brutal, especially regarding Vietnam. I’ve never seen the entire press so relentlessly hound a public figure since then. I don’t remember that LBJ had much of a defense. Eventually he dropped any plans for seeking a full second term.

But Dick Nixon was ready for them. Remember Spiro Agnew and the “nattering nabobs of negativism”? Dick played himself as the victim of a biased press.

And, of course, since the 1970s the American Right has put together a sophisticated media-think tank network that generates and spreads right-wing talking points throughout media. The Left never constructed anything close to that. But the Right has a huge news ecosystem that reaches far and wide, and it keeps growing. For some recent developments see Inside the Hidden Conservative Network Bankrolling an “Ecosystem” of Right-Wing News at Mother Jones.

In 1971 a study cam out that showed, according to right-wing folklore, that most journalists are Democrats. And ever since they’ve brought that up as proof of liberal media bias. Well, sorta kinda. Of the journalists surveyed, 35.5 percent said they were Democrats, 25.7 percent, said they were Republicans, and 32.5 percent called themselves independents. This does not strike me as a result worthy of hysteria. It’s true that since then the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among journalists has shifted in the Democrats favor, but that may be because the Republican party has become more rigidly and extremely ideological in recent decades.

But the overall impact of relentless accusations of bias from the Right has given us a media that is driven to, above all, avoid the appearance of bias. This means that in a political contest, if one candidate is a hopelessly corrupt criminal and the other walks on water and has a halo, news coverage will mute the criminal’s ugly record but focus on every flaw they can find about the saint. Maybe he once wore brown shoes with a black suit. That sort of thing. And they’ve been doing that since the 1970s, at least, Makes me crazy.

The other issue is called the “view from nowhere,” in which a politician is accurately quoted saying something that is obvious nonsense, but the news story lets it stand without correction. Trump isn’t the first politician to get away with that. But how often has he claimed that “other countries” pay his tariffs? As far as I can see, only on MSNOW, some newspaper editorial pages, and some substack columns is it consistently pointed out that Trump clearly doesn’t understand how tariffs work. But if they corrected him every time he said something stupid it would look like bias.

It’s this last part that I hope they will re-think. If they’re going to be threatened over straight reporting after years of bending over backward to make Trump look normal, maybe they’ll rethink their long-time strategy of making both sides look equally good or bad even when they aren’t. Because something’s got to change or we’ll never have a halfway sane country again.

See also The Decay of American Journalism in a Disinformation Age at The New Republic.

Today Trump is claiming that Iran is ready to negotiate but that he’s not ready to make a deal. Trump says the terms “aren’t good enough” yet, but he won’t say what those terms are. Indeed, if negotiations haven’t yet begun how can there be any terms?  The BBC is reporting that “Iran has not asked for a ceasefire and sees no reason for talks with US, Iranian minister says.” So Trump is just blowing smoke, as usual.

See also Trump is eager to declare victory, but a battered Iran still has cards to play at WaPo. The Iranian regime must realize that Trump is only going to grow more desperate to end the war and get the Strait of Hormuz open again. I don’t see them offering to “surrender.”

Trump also suddenly realizes the U.S. has allies, or at least had them before he spent the last 15 months pissing on them. He posted on Truth Social hours ago,

“Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.”

He added that “hopefully” China, France, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and other countries “affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated.”

“In the meantime, the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water,” Trump continued. “One way or the other, we will soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE!”

Along with once again demonstrating he doesn’t understand percentages, Trump announced that many countries will be sending “War Ships” (hey, at least he didn’t call them “boats” this time) to the Strait of Hormuz to help clean up the mess he made. He had asked for the War Ships, but as of this writing no country has pledged support for Trump’s Folly.

Remember, just a week ago Trump imagined that the U.K. was planning to send an aircraft carrier (it wasn’t) and rudely turned down the not-offer, saying the war had already been won. Now he’s begging the U.K. for a ship. It may be dawning on him he’s in big trouble.

Over the past few days I’ve seen a number of people with respected military backgrounds — generals and scholars — on the teevee saying that no nation was ever conquered or forced into regime change by air power alone. This goes back at least to the London Blitz of 1940. Hitler thought that by bombing cities and infrastructure he could force Britain to negotiate, at least. But no.

I have to believe that at some point before Trump chose to join Israel’s war on Iran some general or another tried to explain this to Trump. Trump, of course, believes that he knows more about everything than anybody else and went ahead to do what he wanted. I already put this quote from the Wall Street Journal (as republished on MSN; no paywall) in the comments, but it’s worth reading.

The rapidly expanding war has exposed how the White House was counting on the quick collapse of the Iranian regime, how the planning was confined to a small circle of advisers and how confident Trump was that U.S. military force could contain the fallout. Some takeaways:

Before the U.S. and Israel launched the military assault against Iran on Feb. 28, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Trump in multiple briefings that an American attack could prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that carries 20% of the world’s oil exports from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the globe.

While he acknowledged that it was a possibility, Trump decided to move ahead with the operation. He believed that Tehran would likely capitulate before it could close the strait or cause significant economic damage. And if it came to it, he told his team, the U.S. military would be able to handle it. On Friday evening, Trump said the U.S. bombed military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island, a critical hub for the country’s crude oil exports, to pressure Tehran to reopen the strait.

Here’s a bit more:

Trump has said repeatedly that the war might end soon and he has already claimed victory. He is facing pressure from outside advisers to end the conflict quickly, as well as concerns from fellow Republicans facing a tough midterm election climate. Gulf allies have also expressed their frustration with Washington as Iran has attacked oil refineries, hotels and other civilian targets, piercing the narrative that Gulf nations are safe places for business within a turbulent region.

But Trump is “dug in,” a senior White House official said, adding the timeline being considered remains four to six weeks. The war entered its third week on Saturday. On Friday, Trump said he would end the war when he feels it “in my bones.”

In short, we’re bleeped. Let’s just accept there is no plan. There never was a plan; there will not be a plan. We are all at the mercy of just about everything in the time-space continuum right now.

In other news, plans are being floated to replace the columns on the White House with fancier ones. I’m serious.

In a virtual meeting with G7 leaders Trump boasted that Iran is about to surrender. That was Wednesday. This is from Axios:

State of play: The call took place amid grave concern among G7 leaders over the war’s growing economic fallout.

All of the other leaders urged Trump to end the war quickly, stressing that the Strait of Hormuz must be secured as soon as possible, two officials briefed on the call tell Axios.

Trump said the Hormuz situation is improving and that commercial ships should resume operations in the area, an official briefed on the call said. At least two tankers were set ablaze off the coast of Iraq that night.

The big picture: Trump was “ambiguous and noncommittal” on his objectives and timeline for ending the war, sources said. Some participants left the call believing he wants to wind it down — others felt the complete opposite.

If Iran is about to surrender, maybe we can bring some of our military assets home. Oh, wait …

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sending an amphibious assault ship, the USS Tripoli, and its Marine expeditionary unit to the Middle East, a senior U.S. official confirmed to Axios on Friday.

Why it matters: The deployment will add thousands of Marines, several warships, and F-35 fighter jets to support those already in the region, the U.S. official said.

The U.S. official said U.S. Central Command asked for the new force in order to have more options for military operations against Iran.
The Marine expeditionary unit will be able to conduct ground operations if ordered. The U.S. official declined to comment on that possibility.

Three G7 leaders, — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron — urged Trump not to lift sanctions on Russian oil shipments. So yesterday Trump lifted sanctions on Russian oil shipments

While Trump is widely expected to TACO, sooner rather than later, it’s a real question whether he can. It’s widely reported Iranians have laid mines in the Strait of Hormuz. By all reports the new Ayatollah is more radical than the old one. And then there’s Israel. They are not likely to stop. Trump may take his “boats” (he persists in calling naval vessels “boats” instead of “ships”) and other assets and go home, but the war will continue, and its effects will continue to jerk us around.

But Trump still thinks he’s just producing a really cool reality tv show. The White House persists in releasing video clips of bombing in Iran mixed with video from video games and sports. I understand one video shows real bombing set to the music of “The Macarena.”  I have only seen sample clips of these. They aren’t on YouTube. You’d probably have to go to X or Truth Social to see them. I won’t bother. But here retired NFL star Ryan Clark reacts to NFL footage in a war video. Worth watching.

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See also Welcome to the Derp State by Paul Waldman.

In other news — Trump is pulling out all the stops to get the SAVE America Act passed so he can interfere with the Midterms. At TPM, Emine Yücel explains what would have to happen to get the bill passed in the Senate. I think passage in the Senate is extremely unlikely, but we’ll see.

Today a federal judge blocked the Regime’s subpoenas against Fed chair Jerome Powell.

“A mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning,” Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge on the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., wrote in a court filing.

Boasberg continued: “On the other side of the scale, the Government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.”

“The Court therefore finds that the subpoenas were issued for an improper purpose and will quash them,” the order states.

There’s so much good commentary on Trump’s War I decided to just pull together a link archive of the best I’ve found. I plan to keep adding to this as stuff happens. I hope you find this helpful. All articles should be accessible to everybody. I’ll group them by topic.

Why Trump Made a Bad Decision to Go to War

Various reporters, The New York Times, How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War. Basically, Trump and the dimwits advising him made stupid assumptions.

Thomas Edwall, The New York Times, The Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches Its Apex. “President Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran exemplifies his smash-and-grab approach to governing: acting without apparently considering the lives to be lost, the law or the institutional damage he will leave behind.”

Edith Olmsted, The New Republic, Trump Went to War With Iran Because Jared Kushner Is a Fool.  Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were in charge of negotiating with Iran over its nukes, and neither have a clue what they were negotiating about. There is reason to believe that experienced diplomats being advised by actual nuclear scientists could have gotten a decent deal with Iran about its nuclear weapons program. But these two were too dim to recognize reasonable deal when it was offered to them. And next reas …

Judd Legum, Popular Information, Trump says Kushner helped convince him to go to war with Iran. “The disclosure raises additional questions about the role of Kushner, who is being paid tens of millions of dollars annually by Middle Eastern governments that were reportedly lobbying Trump to attack Iran.”

Why It’s Not Going Well

Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, The Obvious Is Taking Its Revenge on Trump. Foer writes, “almost no other foreign-policy question has been studied harder over the past 20 years or so than the likely effect of U.S. military strikes on Iran.” How things are playing out now are pretty much what 20 years of analysis said would probably happen. Duh.

Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, Operational Excellence, Strategic Incompetence. Trump is mistaking the tactical excellence of the U.S. military with winning the war. Nichols, a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, explains these are two very different things.

David Edwards, Raw Story, ‘Which one is it?’ Fox News tires of Trump calling Iran conflict a ‘war’ and ‘excursion’ Why Trump will never be confused with a serious head of state.

“And we did a little excursion. We had to take this little couple of weeks, a few weeks of excursion, but it’s been incredible,” Trump said while touring a factory in Ohio on Wednesday. “Our military is unbelievable, the job they’re doing. I would say, to put it mildly, way ahead of schedule. We’ve knocked out their Navy, their military in it, all forms. We’ve knocked out just about everything there is, including their leadership, twice. We knocked out twice their leadership.”

“Now they have a new group coming up,” he continued. “Let’s see what happens to them. But 47 bad years we suffered with them, not only us, the rest of the world. We’re doing our jobs. So we had to take an excursion, but it’s going well.”

“You just said it is a little excursion, and you said it is a war,” Doocy noted. “So which one is it?”

“It’s both,” Trump replied. “It’s an excursion that will keep us out of a war. And the war is going to be, I mean, for them it’s a war. For us, it’s turned out to be easier than we thought.”

 

What Could Happen Next

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, Unpacking Trump’s Rhetorical Flip-Flops on Iran. Trump says the war is already won, but the next minute he says it’s barely even started. Says Josh, “It’s Trump so obviously anything could change but I think right now it’s clear that Trump does not have the stomach for a true regime change war, and he’s going to try to get out of this as quickly as he can. The question is can he actually do so fast enough, not look completely stupid and still preserve some idea that the U.S. succeeded at whatever it was we were trying to do?”

Or, maybe not. I don’t think Trump is ready to call it quits yet. He doesn’t realize what he’s done. Give him at least three more weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do see G. Elliott Morris and Strength in Numbers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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