I want to call your attention to a new piece by Judd Legum at Popular Information, The money behind the new Iran War.

In private calls over the last several weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) reportedly urged President Trump to attack Iran. Iran is a top regional rival of Saudi Arabia, and MBS had become concerned about Iran’s growing military capabilities.

The lobbying campaign achieved success on Saturday, when Trump announced he had begun “major combat operations in Iran.” Trump launched a war even though U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. In June 2025, Trump publicly declared that more limited strikes “completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.”

MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war.

Wall Street Journal reports that Trump changes his mind about the “mission” in Iran every few hours.

On Sunday alone, President Trump and his allies offered at least two separate objectives for the assault on Iran, muddying Washington’s intentions for ending a conflict that has engulfed the Middle East and killed three American service members.

Early Sunday morning, close Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said reducing the nuclear and missile threat from Iran was the intention, not regime change. The White House later reiterated that point in a statement.

Elaborating in an interview with the Atlantic, Trump said he was open to discussions with Iran’s current leadership that could end the war if U.S. demands were met.

But hours later, Trump swung back to one of his original goals from the beginning of the air assault on Saturday. In a video, he urged Iranians to “take back your country” from the regime, vowing the U.S. will “be there to help.”

The timeframe for military action has also changed. On Saturday, he posted on social media that the assault will last a week or more. A day later, he told the Daily Mail the fighting has “always been a four-week process.”

It’s likely MBS and Netanyahu both persuaded Trump that attacking Iran was a good idea and that some brilliant result would easily be achieved. Trump has a long history of grasping at simplistic ideas that he thinks will be quick and easy fixes to long-festering, complicated problems. It’s his most consistent trait, along with being hateful and corrupt. After the tactical success of his strike in Venezuela, he probably considers himself a military genius.

This is from today’s New York Post.

President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” by taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

Trump told the Daily Mail on Sunday that he estimated the war would last “four weeks or so,” but hinted to The Post Monday that that timeframe could be shortened.

“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”

As I wrote yesterday, he’s given several estimates of how long the Iran project will take. The earliest estimate I saw was that he expected to conclude the project this week sometime. But now it’s four weeks. And the conflict appears to be spreading. Overnight Israel attacked Hezbollah-controlled areas in Lebanon. And Iran launched a drone strike against a Saudi oil refinery.  Kuwait “mistakenly” shot down three U.S. F-15 fighter jets on Sunday; the crews all ejected safely.

Oh, goodie. I just noticed a new headline at the New York Times.

Brilliant. Trump is now speaking to reporters in the East Room of the White House. I am not listening, but if it’s reported he says anything noteworthy, I’ll add it.

Update: An Iranian drone struck a British military base in Cyprus.

This morning Trump told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic that Iran’s new leadership wants to talk. So Iran has new leadership already? So much for regime change.

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long,” Trump told me in a phone call from his Mar-a-Lago resort shortly before 9:30 a.m.

Except that there were ongoing talks, and word coming from the Foreign Minister of Oman that progress was being made.  Trump can’t keep his stories straight.

Trump expects the people of Iran to rise up and depose the old regime. Everything I’ve read from knowledgeable people is that Iran already had a plan for what would happen if the Supreme Leader was assassinated. As in Venezuela, most likely the “new leadership” is just a reshuffling of the old leadership. Don’t be too surprised if someone emerges as the new Ayatollah in a few weeks. As for a popular uprising taking over, I’m reading that Iran has a lot of different factions that don’t necessarily get along, and trying to form any sort of unified movement from that would be an uphill climb. See Trump is making dangerous assumptions about who will take power in Iran by Sam Kiley at The Independent.

Back to Michael Scherer at The Atlantic:

Soon after our conversation, U.S. military officials announced that three U.S. service members were killed in the operation and five more were seriously wounded—the first known American casualties of the campaign. Trump told me he expects the attack on Iran will not disrupt Republican efforts before this fall’s midterm elections to convince voters that his administration is focused on delivering economic benefits for the country. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had,” he told me. “The word isn’t out because people like you don’t write about it properly. But the economy is ready to go through the roof. And it already is in many cases.”

Sure it is. There is also a real possibility that the Iran stunt will drive up petroleum prices over the next several months, which will not be helpful to Trump’s “affordability” problem.

I’m also reading that Trump thinks the bomb Iran project will end in a week or so. He’s hoping it does, I’m sure. I’m reading that a lot of the MAGA faithful are not happy, but they might forgive Trump if the bombing actually ends soon. See also MAGA Reacts to Trump’s Strikes on Iran: ‘Absolutely Disgusting and Evil’ by Peter Wade at Rolling Stone.

“The attack came despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran’s forces were unlikely to pose an immediate threat to the U.S. mainland within the next decade,” says reporting in the Washington Post. The same reporting also said Trump was pushed into going along with an attack by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Bibi Netanyahu  Not exactly an “America First” duo. Trump has a history of listening to authoritarian strongmen before he listens to his own intelligence services.  I suspect unresolved daddy issues.

I recommend Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People by Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic. It reveals the Trump Administration to be a directionless mess. Various officials apparently are left to themselves to discern what U.S. policy is supposed to be, and their public statements are contradictory. And because Trump’s gang of obsequious amateurs is left to making up their jobs as they go along, often one part of the administration is working at cross-purposes with the other parts. Certainly more could have been done by other presidents to help/encourage the people of Iran to build an effective resistance against the Islamic regime. However, she continues,

The second Trump administration has gone much further in the opposite direction, actually dismantling tools that could have helped promote civic engagement and build a united opposition in Iran. The administration has taken money away from Iranian-human-rights-monitoring groups and defunded media projects. Under the leadership of the former Arizona political candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has prevented Radio Farda, the Farsi-language channel of the U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, from using American transmission equipment.

Voice of America, the U.S. government’s other Persian-language channel, cut back coverage and lost credibility by producing partisan broadcasts. The channel’s leadership has actually banned any mention of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran, who commands a substantial following both inside and outside the country. As a result, VOA lost ground to the Saudi-funded channel Iran International. Lake also cut funding for another agency, the Open Technology Fund, dedicated to providing virtual private networks and satellite access to Iranians, among others. That decision might also help keep Iranians inside the country isolated from the large dissident movement in the diaspora.

So while it’s possible the bomb Iran project will not turn out to be an utter waste of lives and resources — or worse, turn into a long-term regional war — any favorable outcome will not be because of the Trump Administration, but in spite of it. Because the Trump Administration isn’t qualified to run a bake sale.

We can afford wars, but not health care.

I understand that over the past several hours the Foreign Minister of Oman has frantically been telling the Trump Administration that a deal with Iran is really, really, close, and that Iran has agreed to “zero stockpiling” of enriched uranium. But Trump and his buddy Bibi Netanyahu started a war with Iran anyway.

With no congressional input, no real effort to rationalize a massive military intervention to the US people, and with negotiations ongoing, Trump took the US into a major war overnight. This isn’t a necessary or a rational war. It’s a calamitous intervention designed to feed the ego of one man.

— Sasha Abramsky (@sashaabramsky.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 8:58 AM

Yeah, pretty much. See also Simon Tisdall at The Guardian.

Complicating this is that Trump has received no authorization whatsoever from Congress to do diddly squat in Iran. Trump is in direct violation of the Constitution now. There has been a resolution intended to tie Trump’s hands floating around in Congress for a while. Congress is apparently in recess right now, which may be why Trump decided this was the time to strike. There are frantic calls to get everyone back to Washington to vote on the resolution.

See also Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. Along with obliterating Iran’s nuclear program — the same Trump obliterated a few weeks ago, as I recall — he is pushing for regime change.

… the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordnance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us.

Sounds like what Dubya thought would happen in Iraq.

Earlier this week, before the SOTU, I heard someone comment that Trump is not reading the room. After last night I’d say he’s dealing with two different rooms. The die hard MAGA devotees are certain he was brilliant last night. One even declared that last night the Democrats lost the midterms. According to the editorial board of the New York Post, Trump’s home-run State of the Union 2026 showed exactly how crazy the Democrats are. But most of the commentary, and the post-SOTU polls, say Trump’s act didn’t go over all that well.  The bottom line is that it probably didn’t change anyone’s opinion. And it’s looking like Trump’s die-hard fans are less than a third of the electorate. For some time polls have been saying the percentage of people who “strongly approve” of him has been stuck at closer to a fourth of the electorate, in fact.

I didn’t watch, but I’ve seen some outtakes. The bit of shtick where he makes fun of the word “affordability” seems to be a permanent part of his act now.  Trump doesn’t really give speeches as much as put on a variety show, as Tom Nichols wrote at The Atlantic. But whether at a rally or on national television, I can’t see how making fun of the word “affordability” endears him to anybody.

See also Who Said It Better? How Trump’s Economic Pitch Echoes Biden’s. This expresses something I’d already been thinking. I’ve read that a lot of voters turned against Joe Biden in 2024 because he kept saying “Bidenomics” was working,. and the economy was getting better, but people weren’t feeling it in their lives yet. But now Trump is doing the same thing.

Telling voters that the economy is better than they believe is a risky strategy, as Mr. Biden found out in his own truncated re-election campaign. He had spent months with an on-again, off-again branding exercise to sell “Bidenomics” as an economic miracle that never quite stuck. It did not matter that he was armed with a blizzard of macroeconomic data. Voters felt squeezed.

Now, with polls showing that a majority of Americans think that Mr. Trump’s policies have made life less affordable, he was the one trying to sell the idea that America has entered a “golden age.”

“The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” the president said, bragging about what he characterized as the stock market’s rise, the drop in gas prices and lower mortgage rates.

So I’m not too worried that Trump’s act last night cost Democrats the midterms. See also Paul Krugman’s analysis of the “speech.”

Yesterday there was reporting that the DoJ appears to have withheld key Epstein documents from public view, Further, there is reason to believe the withheld files contain allegations that Trump abused a minor. Greg Sargent has details.

Greg Sargent also writes that Trump’s ICE Is Quietly Stockpiling Weaponry—and It Should Alarm Us All. In brief, he writes that the Trump Administration has created a new “terror bureaucracy” that has pumped huge amounts of money into ICE and Border Patrol, creating an unprecedented military force that will likely be with us for many years.

As I wrote yesterday, I do not plan to watch the SOTU tonight. The NY Times usually has a live running commentary on major speeches from several political reporters, and I’d rather just keep an eye on that to see how it’s going. I’m sure the juicy bits will be all over social media soon enough. If anything significant happens I might comment here, though.

The first thing I read this morning is by Paul Waldman at Public Notice, Trump is about to start a war he hasn’t bothered to explain. Trump is still moving military assets toward Iran and talking about maybe attacking or maybe bombing; he hasn’t made up his mind. He seems very unclear what he wants to do or what he wants to accomplish by it. I see there are plans for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to brief House and Senate leadership, along with intelligence committee leaders, at the White House today. Whether that has happened yet I do not know. Trump certainly hasn’t asked Congress for any authorization to attack anybody, however. Yes, I know, that whole Constitution thing is just too confusing.

At the same time, as Waldman points out, there is no particularly compelling reason to attack Iran right this minute. IMO this whole thing has the hallmarks of something Trump just got in his head. Maybe it’s a distraction; maybe he thinks being a war president will boost his polling numbers. Maybe he thinks if he can get a good war going he can cancel the midterms. Who knows?

The real military — the top brass minus Pistol Pete Hegseth — does not want to attack Iran as long as not attacking Iran is a viable option, as it is. After reports of the chair of the Joint Chiefs warned administration officials that taking on Iran would be very risky and costly, Trump had a massive tantrum. .

Eric Schmitt reports for the New York Times:

President Trump said on Monday that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that any eventual military action ordered against Iran would be “something easily won.”

But that is not what General Caine has told Mr. Trump and other senior advisers in recent high-level White House meetings on Iran, people briefed on internal administration deliberations said.

Instead, General Caine has said that the United States has amassed forces in the Middle East to carry out a small or medium strike, but that there would be a potentially high risk of American casualties and that such an operation would have a negative effect on U.S. weapon stockpiles. General Caine has also underscored that the operations under consideration in Iran would be much more difficult than the successful capture last month of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

I sincerely think the best thing that could happen for the U.S. is if Trump had a complete meltdown giving the State of the Union, a meltdown so obvious that even his base could see he’s not mentally capable of making serious decisions about anything. If he were removed from office we’d end up with J.D. Vance, but I think Vance might be somewhat less dangerous. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, but perhaps his instincts for self-preservation would moderate him some. And nobody likes Vance, which means he won’t have the political capital to step too far out of line.

Lots of good stuff to read elsewhere. I especially recommend How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach. It beautifully lays out the case for why the Democrats needs to get over their fetish for centrism. And there’s another good piece by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic, The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted.

Update: Another suggested link: The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

The Wall Street Journal is running editorials opposing Trump’s tariffs, and they aren’t behind paywalls. A couple of days ago I linked to The Embarrassing Truth About Tariffs. This one focuses on who is really paying the tariffs (U.S. consumers) and that “manufacturing boom Mr. Trump promised hasn’t appeared, as manufacturing jobs are down over the last year.”

The most recent one is headlined Why Tariffs Aren’t Shrinking the U.S. Trade Deficit. Overall, U,S, trade deficits remain about where they were when Trump took office in 2025. .Trump’s obsession with trade deficits was always a tad pathological. Trump is obsessed with the idea that if a nation sells more stuff to us than it buys from us, we are being “ripped off.” You might remember that when he announced his “liberation day” tariffs he made a point of making them “reciprocal,” meaning (to Trump) that the tariff rate was based on the deficit between the U.S. and other countries, including islands inhabited entirely by penguins. Freeloaders, those penguins.

But my larger point here is that this is the bleeping Wall Street Journal. Which makes me think that there are a lot of business leaders and Very Monied People who are getting over Trump, and the WSJ editorial board is reflecting that.  Yeah, he cut their taxes, but it’s turning out that in other ways he’s more trouble than he’s worth.

Oh, and the Dow dropped 800 points today.

The State of the Union is tomorrow night. I don’t intend to watch. It’s less painful to follow along reading the written updates in the New York Times and other news sources. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump goes off the rails, big time. It could be epic.

This is right up there with the time Trump had billions of gallons of water released from California reservoirs in the mistaken belief the water would magically flow hundreds of miles south and put out the fires in Los Angeles. Which it didn’t.

This is a real Truth Social post, graphic and all.

The Fox News story on this embarrassment:

“Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there,” Trump wrote Saturday night on Truth Social. “It’s on the way!!!”

Gov. Landry was designated the special envoy to Greenland in December and held formal discussions of the road map of Trump’s designs to solidify Arctic security from threats from Russia or China.

Let us reflect on the fact that Greenland is on Denmark’s socialized health care system, which is a lot better than ours. In comparisons of health care systems among countries around the world, Denmark consistently ranks much higher than the U.S. And Louisiana is close to last among the states in providing health care to its citizens. The worst of the worst. In recent years about 10 percent of adults in Louisiana have had no health insurance — that’s probably higher now — whereas all citizens of Greenland get free health care.

The news comes as Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command evacuated a crew member who required urgent medical treatment from a U.S. submarine in Greenlandic waters, seven nautical miles outside of Greenland’s capital of Nuuk.

The crew member has been transferred to the Greenlandic health authorities via a Danish Defense Seahawk helicopter to a hospital in Nuuk, according to the Joint Arctic Command.

Some news stories are trying to spin Trump’s announcement by saying he had to send the hospital “boat” to take care of the sailor, but the sailor already is getting good care from a hospital in Greenland. Does Trump know there are hospitals in Greenland? Or does he imagine Greenland as some third world country with people living in igloos?

And how much does it cost to send a military hospital ship from Louisiana to Greenland, anyway?

The prime ministers of Greenland and Denmark have informed Trump that Greenland does not need his “boat.”  And of course this is being reported internationally, giving the world another example of what a clueless imbecile Trump is.

But I do hope he brags about sending the hospital “boat” to Greenland in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Maybe the low-info Trump supporters will ask why he’s willing to provide health care to Greenlanders but not to Americans.

Update: It’s being reported that both U.S. Navy hospital ships – the U.S.S. Mercy and the U.S.S. Comfort — are currently docked at a maintenance facility, the Alabama Shipyard in Mobile. Both ships are currently receiving lots of maintenance. Neither is ready to go anywhere on short notice.

In other news — some guy tried to enter the “secure perimeter” at Mar-a-Lago with “what appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can,” the Secret Service announced. The man was shot and killed by Secret Service and a local sheriff’s deputy, it says. Trump was elsewhere at the time.

See also DoJ cases against protesters keep collapsing as officers’ lies are exposed in court at The Guardian.

Here’s a gift link to the live update commentary at the New York Times. It was a six-three decision; the dissenters were Thomas, Alito. and Kavanaugh. Roberts wrote the majority opinion.

As I understand it, Roberts wrote that a president cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to override Congress’s tariff powers in the Constitution. This leaves open the possibility that Trump will use some other contorted legal mechanism to set tariffs, but we don’t yet know what that is or why the SCOTUS wouldn’t strike that down also. The Constitution is crystal clear that the authority to set tariffs belongs only to Congress. And, of course, Trump could just ask Congress to rubber stamp his tariff policies. No guarantees that would work, of course.

Update: This was written and published before the decision. The Wall Street Journal will let you read it if you open a “free” account, so it’s not behind a paywall. In brief, Trump has been throwing a fit over a Federal Reserve report that says 90 percent of the income from the tariffs is being paid by U.S. consumers.

The Fed analysis aligns with other research into the distribution of tariff costs from Harvard economists and Germany’s Kiel Institute—and with common sense. There isn’t widespread evidence that foreign producers are cutting their prices to offset the tariffs, the main mechanism by which foreigners would “pay” for the border taxes.

Nor is the dollar strengthening, which is the other possible mechanism for making foreigners pay (we’ll spare you the equations). Instead the tariffs are causing an increase in post-tariff prices of those goods that are still imported, alongside a modest decrease in the volume of imports. Americans pay higher prices, or “pay” in the form of less choice. …

… So far the manufacturing boom Mr. Trump promised hasn’t appeared, as manufacturing jobs are down over the last year. The New York Fed and other research on cost distribution shows one reason why: To the extent American companies eat some of the costs of tariffs, that’s less cash available for investment and hiring.

If we’re assuming the Wall Street Journal editorial board speaks for the monied class, I’d say that the monied class decided to pull the plug on the tariffs before things got any worse.

See also Layla Jones at TPM.

Update: Trump is currently throwing a temper tantrum on national television. He isn’t making sense, as usual.

From the New York Times:

As Trump says he will impose tariffs under Section 122, the question is how long they will last. The law allows the president to impose those tariffs for 150 days, after which they would need Congressional approval. That will be an uphill battle with midterm elections approaching and more concerns among voters about tariffs adding to the costs of goods.

If he can’t get Congressional approval, the president could turn to other authorities after 150 days. But that would mean yet more uncertainty and unpredictability for businesses that have been whipsawed by this tariff policy.

Update: Paul Krugman on today’s ruling.

Josh Marshall, Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision

Rogé Karma, Get Ready for Zombie Tariffs at The Atlantic

Update: Kate Santaliz reports for Axios that some House members are pushing for a reconciliation bill that codifies the tariffs that were struck down today. However, it doesn’t sound as if there are enough votes to pass it. A handful of Republicans welcomed the Court’s decision.

This morning I saw that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested “on suspicion of misconduct in public office,” with the consent of his brother, King Charles. And a former prime minister and acting president of South Korea was sentenced to 23 years in prison for attempting an insurrection. If other countries can do that, why can’t we? Our bad boys with money and connections get one pass after another.

I’m also reading that considerable U.S. military assets have been assembled in the Middle East and are poised to attack Iran. This attack could happen as soon as Saturday, but Trump hasn’t yet made his final decision about it. No, Congress has not been briefed, never mind consulted. I suspect most Americans haven’t noticed the news stories about it. Trump may very well decide to not go through with it. But if he thinks being a War President will pull up his sagging poll numbers, IMO he’s in for a disappointment.

Trump’s stupid Board of Peace is holding its first meeting today, or perhaps it’s done meeting already. I’m not sure. As of the most recent report I could find the countries that have expressed interest in joining are Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.  Whether any of them have coughed up the $1 billion to be permanent members has not been revealed. I understand a number of other countries sent representatives as “observers,” not as members. So Trump probably did have a big group to meet with.

Anyway, among other things Trump announced the U.S. might attack Iran in the next ten days or so if it won’t make a deal to get rid of its nuclear weapons program. And he announced the U.S. has pledged $10 billion to the Board of Peace for reconstructing Gaza. Where this money is coming from is, um, not clear. Among Trump’s plans for Gaza is a 5,000-person military base, The Guardian reports. Other nations also pledged money for Gaza, but who is collecting this money and what precisely it will be used for is not clear. If Trump follows his usual pattern a lot of it will find its way into Trump family pockets.

And my larger point is that this is all so outside the norm that one would think news media would be expressing some alarm about it. But no.

Elsewhere — I’ve never been a big follower of Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, but he has an excellent column out now headlined Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools — Again. In brief, he’s admitting that Netanyahu’s policies are destroying Israel, not saving it, and that knee-jerk support for Israel does the U.S. no good, either. And what he writes has been blazingly obvious for a long time. But I haven’t seen it expressed any more clearly.

The Trump regime is taking steps to label all demonstrations against its policies as terrorism. And there’s currently a test case in Texas. The DoJ is putting an alleged “Antifa” cell — I’m serious — on trial on charges of terrorism. The plan appears to be to claim that everyone protesting Trump’s policies are “members” of Antifa, which the DoJ has identified as an actual terrorist organization.

The incident for which protesters are being tried happened on July 4 in Prairieland, Texas. Some young people were protesting an ICE  facility. They shot off fireworks and graffitied cars. At some point a police officer allegedly was shot in the neck. He survived. The police arrested everyone they could catch, and those people are now the “cell” on trial. Read background at TPM.

Brandy Zadrozny writes at MS NOW:

Prosecutors characterize the events that night as an “antifa attack” on the federal government. The defense calls it a protest gone wrong. But the implications of this trial extend beyond the fate of one group of activists: For the first time, federal prosecutors are seeking to convict protesters — most of them American citizens — on charges related to domestic terrorism. The outcome will test whether President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign to brand leftist activists as terrorists can succeed in the courts.

“This is the first indictment in the country against a group of violent Antifa cell members,” acting U.S. Attorney Nancy Larson said in a November press release.

Since charges were filed, senior members of the Trump administration have held up the Prairieland case as a proof point in their wider campaign against anti-government organizing, arguing that local activism and demonstrations are coordinated attacks by domestic terrorists. Trump’s Department of Justice portrays antifa — a contraction of “anti-facist” long understood as a loose left-wing ideology, not an organization — as a structured “militant enterprise” comparable to foreign terrorist organizations, one that calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government and poses a national security threat.

Some of the protesters did engage in property damage, and one of them, identified as Ben Song, is accused of shooting the police officer. But this case appears to be a first step in criminalizing all anti-Trump activism. If the DoJ can pretend Antifa is a real terrorist organization, and that everyone who demonstrates in opposition to Trump belongs to it, they will give themselves permission to arrest peaceful protesters.

The next No Kings day will be March 28, btw. If you possibly can, show up.

Some of the defendants in Texas have pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists, which I wonder was part of a plea deal or even coerced.

Elsewhere — Today Paul Waldman’s new Cross Section column is headlined MAGA White Supremacists Are a Bunch of Pathetic Losers. Well, yeah, So much of MAGA bubbled up from the depths of racism and misogyny.  And I want to add a bit to what Waldman wrote.

The little town I grew up in in the 1950s and 1960s was a “sundown town,”  There was a big notice at the bus depot declaring that any Black person caught within town limits after sundown was subject to arrest (worded somewhat differently). So, yeah, it was all White stretching everywhere. I doubt there were any nonwhite people residing in the county. During the 1960s I heard the grownups worry that some day Martin Luther King was going to show up with a bunch of Those People, and they were terrified. But of course that didn’t happen because why would it? It was a little mining town in the Ozarks with not much going for it. Hardly anyone ever moved there. You had to be from there to belong.

Paul Waldman writes that White supremacists are “whiny and stupid and weak, their ideas whither under even a moment’s scrutiny or questioning, and their fantasies of oppression are pathetic.” Well, yeah. It’s a really good column and worth reading. I just want to throw in a couple of my own observations.

Something I realized while I was still a Young Person: The hard-core White supremacists, the one who are really into it, are the most ordinary people you can imagine. As a rule they are not notably successful, intelligent, or accomplished at anything. There’s nothing about them to make them special, except that they are White. And they cling to that with all they’ve got. It’s the core of their identifies, the one thing they can point to to claim validation for their existence. They’re White, by gawd, so they are owed respect and status. And if they don’t get that, it’s oppression.  This is not to say that people with education and accomplishment can’t believe in White superiority, too, but as a rule it’s not as important to them.

The other observation, which I picked up from social psychology journals, is that White bigots sincerely believe all White people feel as they do about race. White people who say otherwise and who denounce racism are phonies, or “just being PC.” If the bigots ever got it in their heads that a lot of us Other White People think White supremacists are contemptible, stupid goobers, their heads would probably explode.

Also — Noting the passing of Jesse Jackson and Robert Duvall. RIP.