Yesterday when I was buying groceries the young man at the cash register was talking with another employee about bombs dropping on the U.S., probably on New York City. If there are bombs, he said, he’d be on the first plane back to Ecuador. I asked who was planning to bomb us, and he said Iran. I assured him that Iran isn’t capable of such a thing at the moment, and I don’t believe it is. But I wished him good luck, anyway.
Today Iran’s ambassador to the UN said something along those lines in a press conference, but who was saying it yesterday? Somebody must have, somewhere. Just not in any of my regular media sources. Are we going back to melting down over yellowcake and centrifuges? Of course Iran could assault U.S. troops stationed in the region, not to mention U.S. ships and aircraft recently deployed to the region. So there are real risks here.
Trump is suddenly sounding very hawkish.

As others have said in other contexts, — who’s “we,” Kemosabe? I take it no decisions have been made yet, but Trump must be seriously considering getting in on Israel’s action in Iran. Some news stories say Trump is being “pressured” by Israel, but Josh Marshall has another take.
As I noted earlier, what’s driving Trump here is the hunger to get in on a “win.” It might be best to see it as a typical Trumpian branding exercise. Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it. …
… Israel has created the circumstances which allow Donald Trump a risk-free “win” of immense magnitude. That is the issue here. Set aside whether or not doing this is wise. I’m talking about why we’re suddenly here. Why two or three days ago the White House was clear they weren’t getting involved and suddenly it all changed. The evolution here is that the Israelis have created an opportunity Trump simply cannot resist. A big, big win with very little risk in the short term. All the force is on one side of the question and nothing is pushing back in the opposite direction. It’s less an evolution of views than simple physics.
Of course, there’s more than the short term. But that’s not how Trump thinks.
The official White House position as of a few minutes ago or so is that Iran is “very close” to having nuclear weapons. Whether that’s true or not depends on whom you ask and what you mean by “very close.” From what I can gather, experts who are not speaking for Israel or for Donald Trump do not think Iran has nuclear weapons now, or has the ability to assemble such weapons by next week. But they could possibly do so within, maybe, a few months. It’s hard to say, since they don’t allow inspections.
Whatever. The new White House position is that Iran is imminently dangerous. Poor Tulsi Gabbard suddenly finds herself at odds with an increasingly hawkish Trump.
Those tensions came to the forefront early Tuesday when a reporter aboard Air Force One asked Trump about Gabbard’s declaration before Congress in March that Iran was not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. Trump appeared to dismiss her assessment.
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump replied. “I think they were very close to having a weapon.”
I guess it doesn’t matter that he blows off security briefings. For Trump, the truth is whatever he says it is.
Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic,
You may have heard it said that Donald Trump won in 2024 in part by vowing to end “forever wars.” During the campaign, Trump ripped Democrat Kamala Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney, slamming her for wanting “war with every Muslim Country known to mankind.” News organizations credulously insisted that this sort of anger over military entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled Trump’s “movement.” Some even suggested that war fatigue—not his unflagging affection for Vladimir Putin—drove Trump-MAGA opposition to arming Ukraine.
A new battle between Trump and Tucker Carlson over Israel’s war with Iran is severely undermining that understanding of MAGA. Carlson and MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon, among others, have been urging Trump not to deploy the U.S. military in tandem with Israel. Trump appears close to doing so, and people like Carlson and Bannon are loudly proclaiming that this would betray the MAGA movement—which in turn is angering Trump.
But I take it there are other rightie influencers who are breaking with Trump over this. The thing is, last year during the campaigns the right-wing media bubble was portraying Joe Biden as a warmonger and Trump as a peacekeeper. I started running into MAGAts on social media who called Trump a “man of peace” and were critical of Biden for starting wars, although if pressed on precisely which wars Biden had started they seemed confused. And this was the sort of propaganda that those not plugged into right-wing media would easily have missed.
But I do think “Trump will keep us out of wars” was a big part of the Trump cult mythos. And, yeah, I don’t doubt that 20 years ago some of these same people were all fired up to invade Iraq. But the wingnut Right seems mostly to have flipped back to being isolationists, which the Right hasn’t been since the 1930s. Can they all be re-flipped to support Trump if he decides to aid Israel against Iran? And what do his good buddies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar think about this? And for that matter, where is Congress? Oh, never mind … Everybody who thought Trump was a “man of peace” needs to get with the program.
Where we stand at the moment, according to the New York Times:
President Trump said Wednesday that the United States may join the Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. But he also said the U.S. may not.
“Nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he said during an event to install flag poles outside the White House.
I’m sure Trump doesn’t know what he’s going to do, either. I just hope Iran doesn’t say or do anything that pisses him off in the next few days. It’s always possible he’ll cool off and go back to isolationism, and then take credit for how brilliant he was to do that.
In other news: I want to say something about the arrest of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander by Ice yesterday. And, yes, that was just wrong. But now I’m wondering if this could shake up the Dem primary election for mayor. The primary is June 24, but early voting started June 14.
As you probably know, Andrew Cuomo is running and has been leading, by a little, in the polls. I seriously do not want Andrew Cuomo to win. The city’s progressives appear to be coalescing around another candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who has been closing in on Cuomo in the polls. Cuomo’s well-funded super PAC launched a $5.4 million attack ad campaign reminding voters that back in 2020 Mamdani said something about defunding the police. I don’t know if that tactic will work as well in NYC as it does in Missouri, but we’ll see.
Brad Lander has been running third. Late last week Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed each other, which only makes sense in the context of NYC’s ranked-choice voting system. Instead of voting for one candidate, voters are asked to list their top five favorite candidates by rank. (Although they can choose just one candidate, if they like.) If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the ballots are recounted in rounds. The candidate with the least votes is eliminated. So for those ballots that had that candidate first, in the next round votes for the candidates listed second are counted. And if nobody has more than 50 percent, there’s another round. So it’s hard to know how a bump in support for Lander will affect the race. But polls have Cuomo just under 50 percent, so there could be multiple rounds of counting. I’d be happy if Cuomo got knocked out of the race by a can of soup, but I’d also be very pleased with either Mamdani or Lander as the nominee. Fingers crossed.