Is the U.S. at war with Iran, or not? Opinions vary.

Another perspective on Why He Did It.

Amazing. NYT has more confirmation that Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was motivated in large part by the way the Israeli strikes were “playing” on Fox News, which drove him to want credit for it

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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) June 23, 2025 at 6:47 AM

I suspect this is pretty much it.  You can read the story here — Shifting views and misdirection: How Trump decided to strike Iran.

Mary Trump wrote, “Donald is still no doubt stinging from the acronym recently coined to mock his inability to follow through on anything—TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.” So he did the typical chickenhawk thing and put others in danger to show how tough he is. Further,

It is long past time that we stop imputing some deeper or reasonable motives to Donald Trump. Despite being depraved and cruel, much like his cohort Benjamin Netanyahu, he is driven by the most primitive impulses that center almost solely around protecting his fragile ego from humiliation (about which he has a pathological terror) and himself from the reality that he is a complete fraud.

See also Pentagon Worked Up ‘Ruse’ to Fool Iran on Strikes Because They Feared Trump Would Give It Away on Social Media: NYT. The military people were genuinely worried Trump would sabotage his own bombing mission by blabbing the plans on social media.

And, as usual,, Trump keeps stepping on his own talking points.

President Donald Trump’s top national security officials spent much of Sunday insisting his administration doesn’t want to bring about the end of Iran’s government, only its nuclear program. Then Trump left the door open for exactly that.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

J.D. Vance tried to argue that the U.S. wasn’t at war with Iran, just it’s nuclear weapons program. Which is stupid, but at least Vance is smart enough to understand that in the long run it will be better for the Trump Administration to argue that it hasn’t unilaterally declared war on Iran. But Trump has been blathering about “regime change” for the past couple of days.

We all see the parallels with the invasion of Iraq. But some things are different. Bush-Cheney-Rove, aided by right-wing media, spent more than a year before the actual invasion on a relentless propaganda campaign that falsely tied 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. All true American patriots were supposed to hate Saddam and support taking him out. Right now if you lined up a hundred random Americans and asked them who is the leader of Iran, probably most would not know his name (Ali Hosseini Khamenei) or know anything about him beyond his being “some ayatollah.” And many wouldn’t know even that much. Further, Iran hasn’t done anything to us lately. Not for a long time.

I expect the Republican Party and MAGA supporters to fall in line, but if the situation in Iran escalates and draws U.S. troops into more conflict, I suspect most Americans will not be happy about it or support what Trump is doing. If it stops with just the Saturday bombing raids, probably everyone will move on to the next disaster. But if Trump pushes this further, I don’t see the American people rallying around him. And he may not understand that.

In other news: Next Trump will be claiming that he wrote the Gettysburg Address.

Leavitt: “Nobody knows what it means to accomplish peace through strength better than President Trump. He is the one who came up with that motto and that foreign policy doctrine.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 23, 2025 at 8:39 AM

If “peace through strength” sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s been said a lot. Starting with the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century CE. Ronald Reagan used to say it a lot also.

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The Pentagon says that a total of 14 “bunker-buster” bombs were dropped on the deep underground nuclear facility of Fordo. And according to reporting today, the facility was damaged but not completely destroyed. We have no idea if Iran’s nuclear program was set back all that much. There has been no rise in detectable radiation levels at any of the bombed sites, which strikes me as a tad odd, but I’m no expert in these matters. While Trump was quick to claim supreme success, it may be a few days before we know if the bombings had any significant effect on Iran’s nuclear programs, whatever they were.

And, of course, there was no intel whatsoever calling Iran an imminent nuclear threat to anybody. I’m assuming Trump just chose to believe what Bibi told him. Rolling Stone:

… according to two administration officials with knowledge of internal deliberations in recent weeks, the president’s decision to strike was not driven by any new U.S. intelligence on Iran.

“There is no intel,” says one of the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Nothing new, that I’m aware of… The president is protecting the United States and our interests, [but] the intelligence assessments have not really changed from what they were before.”

“What they were before” was that Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons and wasn’t actively working on building nuclear weapons.

Another issue is whether Trump properly notified Congress before engaging in an act of war against another nation. “The top two Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, were both notified of the US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities ahead of time, according to multiple GOP sources,” says CNN. But no Democrats knew about it until they saw it on the news. The bombings seem to fall into a hole not clearly covered by the War Powers Act or anything else. If the bombings turn out to be a one and done thing, probably nobody is going to call Trump out for it. But if troops are put in danger, or are drawn into any armed conflicts as a result of the bombings, Trump is supposed to get congressional approval to proceed. And he’s allergic to having to ask permission to do anything.

Note also that before the bombings a lot of people were yelling at Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to get off their butts and insist on congressional authorization for any military action Trump took toward Iran. They did nothing. Peter Beinart wrote in the New York Times a couple of days ago,

From the moment Israel struck Iran, it was obvious the United States might be sucked in. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made it clear he wanted Washington to join Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. And on the day of the first attack, when Tehran retaliated by launching missiles at the Jewish state, the United States helped shoot them down.

Despite this, the initial statements by the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, and their House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said nothing about the need for Congress to authorize war. As the days passed and news reports suggested that Mr. Trump was edging toward entering the fray, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, invoked the War Powers Act to require the president to gain congressional permission. Thomas Massie, a Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat, proposed something similar in the House.

Neither Mr. Schumer nor Mr. Jeffries has signed on. Nor has Mr. Schumer agreed to co-sponsor another bill that Senator Bernie Sanders introduced, prohibiting funding for military force against Iran absent congressional approval (despite backing the same legislation in 2020).

I mean, did they have better things to do? Schumer has frustrated me for years. But I’m starting to think Jeffries isn’t an improvement. Of course they couldn’t have gotten anything passed, but sometimes just getting on the record that you tried is a good thing.

The best thing I’ve read so far about the bombings is by Marcy Wheeler, When Hegemons Backslide. Just read the whole thing. Very briefly, she’s saying that Trump’s foreign policy has been to destroy U.S. global hegemony — “soft power,” if you will — in favor of U.S. military dominance. And this is because Trump is a stupid man with little understanding of history or how the international order was working before he started to smash it. He only understands dominance. In his world, you’re either dominating others or they’re dominating you.

Related to that is my long contention that Trump doesn’t know how to function in a large, complex organization like a government. He’s never had a job. He has no personal experience of being part of a big multi-level corporation with lots of divisions and many layers of management. He’s used to running a family business. His company may be “large,” in that it has holdings in a lot of places, but it’s just him and the boys running it, for good or ill. He’s never had to work “with” anybody, Clearly, he doesn’t know how. He knows one way to function, which is him making all the decisions and giving all the orders. He can’t cope with having to negotiate with or get consent from other branches of government to do what he wants to do. In his first term he had people telling him what he could and couldn’t do, but not now. And the Republicans in Congress are letting him get away with it.

Back to the bombing. Josh Marshall:

We should remember that you can’t destroy the quest to create a nuclear weapons (or more specifically the quest to have all the parts and knowledge to do so on short notice) with bombing alone. If you take the logic of this action on its own terms it has to set the stage for negotiations or effective deterrent. In other words, one option is you hopefully destroy a lot of what Iran has spent years building. With that done, you hope they are more open to an agreement that gets them to verifiably agree not to work on the building blocks for nuclear warheads because you’ve demonstrated that the costs are too great. Or perhaps with this demonstration you make clear that any rebuilding effort will be met by another similar or more devastating attack. So they give up on the effort because they decide it’s not worth it or simply hopeless. You’ll always destroy the work before it gets to completion.

Absent one version of those scenarios being the case they just restart their efforts and get there again in say two or three years. And presumably that’s an Iran far more focused on actually building a deliverable nuclear weapon to be sure it never finds itself in this position again.

So, in the long run Trump may have just made matters worse.

Update: The New York Times is reporting that Trump officials have conceded they don’t know exactly where Iran was keeping its near-weapons-grade uranium stockpile or if any of their bombs destroyed it. If the stockpile is undamaged, that might explain why no one has detected any uranium leaks at the bombing sites. And Iran is saying no more negotiations with the U.S., and I can’t say I blame them. So it may be that Trump just plain screwed up with the bombing.

Well, I guess the moron did it. This is the home page of the New York Times

Here’s the Times’s coverage. Trump has already declared the raids a “great success.” Josh Marshall reminds us that Trump may be a bit premature in his assessment. Not the first time, of course. Maybe somebody can find the old banner and hoist it over the White House, or something. But damage assessments can take some time.Trump can’t possibly know how “successful” any of this was, yet.

Josh continues,

Let’s state the obvious that the US has committed a major act of war against another country without any specific immediate or even medium term threat. This is not a token bombing of the kind the US has done more than a few times in the post-Cold War era to make a point.

Dropping bombs on the Houthis in Yemen has almost become a presidential tradition. Bombing Iran is different, and I’m not sure Trump is bright enough to appreciate the difference. Maybe he’ll stop at these three bombing raids, and maybe there won’t be any blowback that hits our troops in t he region. Maybe. Or maybe Trump is about to be schooled in the deep meaning of the word quagmire.

Best comment on Bluesky —

It’s a good thing Congress isn’t alive to see this

— Stone Cold Jane Austen (@abbyhiggs.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 8:47 PM

Let’s start with a requiem for the White House Rose Garden. There has been a garden in this same area of the White House lawn since the days of Edith Roosevelt, Teddy’s wife. It became a rose garden in Ellen Wilson’s time.  And during the Kennedy administration, it became Jackie’s Rose Garden. The Kennedy-era garden was not, strictly speaking a “rose garden” but was a flower garden with a variety of flowers and crabapple trees. And it was designed by some famous garden designer, but I bet Jackie had a lot of input.

But during the Trump I Administration, Melania got rid of the crabapples and the flowers and turned it into this:

We’re told the sidewalk was added because ladies with heels had a hard time walking on the grass. And now we won’t even have the grass, because Trump is having it all paved over.

I take it the reason for this is that it’s hard to get big media equipment onto the grassy lawn for “rose garden” events. Except there’s no rose garden any more. Couldn’t they have paved some other part of the grounds for the media equipment and the ladies with high heels and leave Jackie’s garden alone? I swear, that man turns everything he touches into something tacky and ugly.

In other news: A week ago I wrote that Trump had decided to stop immigration raids that affected the agriculture and hospitality industries. Well, skip that. It appears Trump genuinely wanted to hold off on agriculture and hospitality, but  Stephen Miller and Tom Homan overruled Trump and plan to continue the raids. And is this a big red flag that Trump is not really running much of anything now, but his mouth?

In more other news: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to let Trump retain control of the National Guard he federalized in California. This didn’t surprise me. Analyses of last week’s hearing all predicted that’s what the court would do, although one could always hope everyone was wrong. The only analysis of the decision I have found is at Reason magazine, which I usually ignore.  And the column in Reason in which it appears is a continuation of what was once a right-wing political blog. But the analysis seems reasonable to me. Most of the written decision seems to lean away from Trump having the authority to unilaterally federalize the Guard in Los Angeles, but the court applied a “a highly deferential standard of review.” So while they didn’t entirely agree with the administration’s arguments, they are letting Trump get away with it. Naturally, Trump is planning to deploy more troops.

Is AI Over-Hyped? There was a thread at Bluesky that argued that women are more skeptical of, or at least less credulous about, AI than men. That would include me, as I am definitely an AI skeptic. I think it’s useless, frankly. You can’t trust anything it does. So I read with interest this essay on a Harvard website, Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate.

Will Trump go to war in Iran? The best news I heard this morning is that the Kremlin opposes regime change in Iran. It’s obvious that Trump is utterly befuddled. He’s put Israel on a “two week” hold. Wars can’t be put on hold. There is talk of restarting negotiations, although Iran wants a cease-fire first. But as of yesterday it was looking as if Trump was working up to Take Out Saddam Hussein II.

Fox News bobbleheads are screaming to invade Iran, often using some of the same arguments that got us into Iraq. But other parts of MAGA are pushing in the other direction. And Steve Bannon is calling for an investigation of Fox News. Most of the hard-core MAGAts are isolationists, I take it.

Believe it or not, there is a very good, and thoughtful, analysis of the Israel-Iran-Trump-neocon-isolationist mess we’re in now at The American Conservative.

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.

The story behind the Minnesota shootings gets stranger and stranger.

Partly for my own benefit, here are the four victims: State representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman were killed. State senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman were shot but survived. I believe the Hoffmans are still alive, but I haven’t heard how serious their injuries are.

At 2 a.m. yesterday police went to the Hoffman house in Champlin, MN, to check on a report of shooting. The shooter had already left. The Hoffmans were found and taken to a hospital. At some point the Champlin police called the PD in nearby Brooklyn Park, MN, and suggested they check on the Hortmans. The Brooklyn Park police arrived at the Hortman house at 3:35 a.m. The shooter was still there. He came out the front door and exchanged gunfire with the cops.  Then he re-entered the house and fled out the back door. That’s when the cops got hold of his car, which had been detailed to look like a police car. And that’s when they found the “hit list” with several names and a note about No Kings. The shooter was wearing “a blue shirt with a black tactical vest underneath and blue pants,” according to this report.

Mother Jones:

Multiple news outlets, including CNN, ABC, and the Minnesota Star Tribune, have reported that the alleged shooter—57-year-old Vance Luther Boelter, who remains at large—left a list of names behind in his car that included abortion providers and advocates and figures with ties to Planned Parenthood, along with Democratic politicians. Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-Minn.), told the Star Tribune that she was on the shooter’s list and that local law enforcement told her to shelter in place on Saturday; a spokesperson for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told the New York Times the senator was also on the list.

Much is still unknown about the suspect’s motivations. A longtime friend of Boelter told CNN on Saturday that the alleged shooter was a staunch opponent of abortion rights. On Meet the Press Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, “There clearly was some through line with abortion because of the groups that were on the list and other things that I’ve heard were in this manifesto.”

I don’t believe the list itself has been made public, but anyone one the list has been notified. The connection to abortion squares with what Wired reported yesterday. Rep. Hortman in particular had worked to protect access to abortion in Minnesota.

The deeper one digs into Vance Boelter, the weirder he seems. Initially it was reported he owns some sort of security company, but subsequent reporting has suggested the company is a fantasy. NPR:

Authorities said Boelter disguised himself as a law enforcement officer during the attack and news reports have focused on his apparent work as a security professional. But NPR’s review of Boelter’s online records and employment history found many of those claims about his professional life that appear untrue.

In social media posts and websites, Boelter said he had extensive experience as a security professional with “training by both private security firms and by people in the U.S. Military.”

NPR found little evidence to support Boelter’s account. He appears to have worked most of his career in the food service industry and one long-time friend described parts of Boelter’s narrative about his life as “fantasy.” …

… On the website for a company called Praetorian Guard Security Services, LLC, Boelter described himself as part of the “leadership team.”

NPR found no record of the firm having clients or providing any services. A call to the company’s phone number connected to what appears to be a private phone line, not a business. The address listed in incorporation papers appeared to be that of a law firm specializing in divorce litigation.

Boelter himself appears to have no history working in law enforcement, the military or private security.

The New York Times interviewed a close friend of Boelter named David Carlson. Boelter rents a room in Carlson’s house and stays there several days a week, even though Boelter is married and, one assumes, has a home somewhere else. Carlson said Boelter has been working at a funeral home of late. Carlson also said Boelter “owned guns and had voted for President Trump last year.” Further,

Mr. Carlson said Mr. Boelter is a Christian who strongly opposed abortion. He had never mentioned either of the lawmakers who were shot, Mr. Carlson said, and had generally avoided talking about politics. He said Mr. Boelter had been experiencing financial and mental health challenges.

And this, from the same NY Times story, is just bizarre.

The man suspected of shooting two Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota early on Saturday had served on a state board with one of the victims, records show.

The suspect identified by the authorities, Vance Boelter, 57, was appointed several times by Minnesota governors to the Workforce Development Board, where he served with State Senator John A. Hoffman, who was shot and survived. …

… Mr. Boelter was appointed to the board in 2016 by Mark Dayton, a Democrat who was then the governor. More recently, he was appointed by Gov. Tim Walz, also a Democrat. The board has 41 members who are appointed by the governor, and its goal is to improve business development in the state.

Boelter must have persuaded somebody that he was a real business owner and not a fantasy business owner, and nobody bothered to check him out.

That’s where we are so far. But what I really want to talk about is how this is being reported in right-wing media. Yesterday, to see how the story was being twisted, I went to a reliable source for crazy — Gateway Pundit, to which I do not link. GP already was reporting that Gov. Walz had appointed Boelter to a state board, insinuating that the Governor was behind the shooting. I’ve since read that right-wing influencers are spreading the story that Gov. Walz paid Boelter to do the shootings.

Further, in the wingnut-o-sphere Boelter is being described as a “left-leaning” close associate of Walz, and that Boelter’s wife worked for Walz some time in the past. The Minnesota Star-Tribune has debunked these claims. There’s no evidence Boelter has ever met Gov. Walz, and the Jenny Boelter who worked for Walz back in 2010 or so was a different person, says the Star-Tribune. I take it the board Boelter was appointed to (originally by a previous governor) meets irregularly and doesn’t do a whole lot.

Fox News yesterday suggested another motivation — the shooter must be pro-illegal immigrant.

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Melissa Hortman, who was fatally shot on Saturday with the suspect still at large, made headlines earlier this week for being the only Democratic vote in the state House to vote to repeal taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage for adult illegal immigrants.

“I know that people will be hurt by that vote and I’m – we worked very hard to try and get a budget deal that wouldn’t include that provision,” she said following the vote that she said was done in order to move the budget forward in a split legislature, according to Kttc. Republicans hold the House 67-66, and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party holds the Senate 34-33.

It’s not clear to me what Hortman was voting against, though. The story suggests she wanted the provision removed from the budget bill so that the budget bill could pass the House and be forwarded to the Senate. She’ wasn’t actually against denying health care to anybody. And it doesn’t explain why the Hoffmans were targeted. Sen. Hoffman backed legislation that extended the state’s health-care program to undocumented immigrants, according to the Associated Press.

But if you run into wingnuts who fervently believe Vance Boelter is a lefty, now you know why.

From what I’ve seen in media, the nationwide No Kings demonstrations were a smashing success. They were huge, they were peaceful. The only incidents I’ve heard of involved Trump supporters who showed up trying to start trouble (for example).

The shootings in Minnesota put a damper on the day and also ate up most of the news coverage. The latest information I have seen says the suspect is known to be a radical evangelical who opposes abortion and LGBTQ rights. There’s some good reporting on this from Wired.

I’ve heard very little about Trump’s vanity parade, except that it happened. This is from a New York Times reporter:

Overall this was a pretty listless and low-energy parade and crowd. People wearing Trump paraphernalia far outnumbered those wearing Army hats and shirts from what I could see. There were no speakers along the parade route, so spectators couldn’t hear whatever was being broadcast by the announcers closer to the reviewing stand. People are now flooding across Constitution Avenue at 18th Street to leave.

Also,

There was one part of this that gave me confidence. It was when they were rolling the tanks through the street and the tank crews were full of smiles and waving to the admittedly small crowd. This just isn’t how you do one of these strong man parades. The soldiers are impassive. They look at …

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 9:00 PM

2/ El Jefe. They’re a spectacle of power. This was at least in that moment the way I’d like to see American soldiers interacting with the public, smiles, hi, waving at kids.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 9:00 PM

Here are some good photos of the No Kings demonstrations from NPR. And check out Seattle! Over 70K in Seattle denounce Trump at massive ‘No Kings’ rally. Over 70K just in Seattle!

Every day feels like Friday the 13th these days, but now it really is.

Item One: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals put a temporary hold on yesterday’s order to de-federalize the California National Guard in Los Angeles and put them back under Governor Newsom’s control. The Ninth Circuit Court will hold a hearing on Tuesday.

Item Two: There are thunderstorms predicted for the Washington DC area tomorrow, which could force the cancellation of Trump’s $45 million Soviet-style vanity parade.

Item Three: Israel v. Iran. It sounds as if Israel’s assault did a number on Iran, damaging a key nuclear facility and wiping out its military chain of command.  Some top Iranian officials and nuclear scientists were killed also. Axios reports the assault had been in the works for months.

Did Trump know this was going to happen? The New Republic says he did, although he’s pretending he didn’t. His Administration went to great lengths yesterday to let the world know the U.S. played no part in the assault.

Some background: Trump appointed a real estate executive pal named Steve Witkoff as Special Enjoy to the Middle East. Among the projects assigned to Witkoff is getting a deal to curb nuclear weapons development in Iran. And you might remember that once upon a time there was such a deal, negotiated among several nations during the Obama Administration.  After taking office in 2017 Trump badmouthed the deal, which he managed to blow up entirely in 2018. He claimed it was a terrible deal and he could make a better one, but he never did. I don’t think he even tried, in his first term.

But for the Trump 2.0 Administration, Trump decided to repackage himself as a peacemaker. He promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine immediately. Before he took office, even. He was going to straighten out whatever was going on with Israel and Hamas.  And, of course, as soon as he realized accomplishing these things would be really hard, he walked away. But he was still working on getting a deal with Iran.

As usual, Juan Cole gets what’s going on.

Netanyahu launched the strikes to thwart the peace negotiations being conducted with Iran by President Donald J. Trump’s administration via Oman, striking a day before the next talks were scheduled to take place. Trump had signaled repeatedly that he did not want the Israelis to attack, but Netanyahu appears to hold to the TACO (Trump always chickens out) theory of the president’s behavior. He pointedly thanked Trump in his address to the nation, clearly hoping that Iran might take some action against America in response and so draw Trump into a war he clearly does not want.

I understand Iran has pulled out of further talks with the U.S. Trump probably didn’t help matters much when he praised the Israeli attack as “excellent” and “very successful.” Tucker Carlson, of all people, is now saying Trump is “complicit” in an “act of war.” Some media outlets are saying that Israel used the “peace talks” as cover for what they were doing.

See also How Iran Strikes Put Trump’s Impotence on Full Embarrassing Display by David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast.

Item Four: It must have been brought to Trump’s attention that the agriculture and hospitality industries depend a whole lot on migrant workers. Indeed, Trump has been using migrant workers at his properties for years, so one might assume he already knew this. But dots don’t always connect for him. Anyway, some time maybe yesterday or the day before he commented that farmers and the hospitality industry needed some protections to keep their migrant workers, which suggested he was going to lay off raiding farms and hotels. But as of today, there have been no new directives about this coming out of the White House.

As I understand it, the worst that happened in the “riots” in Los Angeles was a lot of graffiti and about five Waymo self-driving taxis  set on fire. And for this Trump is blowing $135 million to deploy 5,000 National Guard and Marines to do whatever. Genius.

In Trump’s addled mind, everyone is always in awe of what a great job he is doing. Sure.

“The possible arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles absent clear coordination presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city,” Chief Jim McDonnell said, adding, “The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively.”

On Wednesday, Trump seems to have taken McDonnell’s statement as praise. “If we weren’t there, if we didn’t bring in the National Guard and the Marines, you would probably have a city that was burning to the ground,” Trump told the press at a performance of “Les Miserables” at the Kennedy Center. (In reality, the largely peaceful protests have been confined to just a few blocks in the city.) Trump continued, “In fact, the chief of police said so much, if you look at what his statements were. He said, ‘We’re very lucky to have had them.’”

But McDonnell rejected that claim. Asked by CNN host Kaitlin Collins if Trump’s characterization of his statement was accurate, McDonnell said, “No. We were not in a position to request the National Guard.”

McDonnell listed the resources local law enforcement officials have at their disposal to respond to demonstrations, should they get out of hand. Then he stated flatly that the protests haven’t risen to a level that warrants military intervention. “We’re nowhere near a level that we would be reaching out to the governor for National Guard at this stage,” he said, “And my hope is that things are going in the right direction now and that we wouldn’t have had to have done that, or we won’t either.”

I read this morning that there has been some looting over the past three days or so, but that suggests the looting started after the troops showed up on Sunday.  A local television news story says the looters are “habitual agitators,” not the protesters.  Of course, Fox News viewers are being told the looters are “anti-ICE protesters.” And the rightie website Hot Air is running a hysterical story saying that “the riots in Los Angele are not organic spillovers from extemporaneous protests against ICE, but well-funded operations designed to create mayhem in the streets.”  At least the story doesn’t mention George Soros for a change. Righties also sincerely believe all of Los Angeles is on fire, which of course it isn’t. I take it Fox News has been showing a video of a burning Waymo cab on a continuous loop for several days.

I can remember back in the 1990s when the wingnuts were incessantly screaming about the “jack-booted thugs” of government stomping on the rights of honest citizens, especially after Ruby Ridge and Waco. And I’d be the first to say that Ruby Ridge and Waco were grossly mishandled. But here’s Trump pushing the jack-booted thug approach to a situation that is really a local police matter. Worse, Trump is over-using force to suppress lawful dissent against him.

The Guardian is reporting that at least some of the troops in Los Angeles realize they are being used.

California national guards troops and marines deployed to Los Angeles to help restore order after days of protest against the Trump administration have told friends and family members they are deeply unhappy about the assignment and worry their only meaningful role will be as pawns in a political battle they do not want to join.

Three different advocacy organisations representing military families said they had heard from dozens of affected service members who expressed discomfort about being drawn into a domestic policing operation outside their normal field of operations. The groups said they have heard no countervailing opinions.

The best thing I’ve read about Los Angeles is by Rebecca Solnit, Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence. Just read it.

Something else to read is Funding the War on Ourselves by Josh Marshall at TPM.

Also, too: Paul Krugman, This Is Not a Drill.

Update: So this just happened:

Watching CNN’s coverage to see how it’s playing, and even though this video has been out here for an hour they just showed a still from it for the first time.

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 12, 2025 at 3:39 PM

Reichsminister Noem actually said in a press conference, “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country.” And when Senator Padilla confronted her, this is what happened.

Update: Another good read — Will Bunch, From Fort Bragg to L.A., Trump enlists the military in a slow-motion coup

Update: Netanyahu has launched an attack on Iran, and a lot about this move is making Trump look like an idiot, but I’ll say more about this tomorrow. The domestic news is that a federal judge has ordered control of the National Guard in Los Angeles to be returned to the governor. From the New York Times:

A federal judge issued an order late Thursday blocking President Trump from deploying members of the California National Guard in Los Angeles, and ordered the administration to return control of the forces to Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The order from District Judge Charles R. Breyer, which takes effect Friday at noon Pacific time, delivered a sharp rebuke to President Trump’s effort to deploy thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of an American city, a move has contributed to nearly a week of political rancor and protests across the country.

I can’t say that Trump has thought out an end game in California. but if there were one, what would it be? Because, thinking or not, Trump is likely to go there eventually.

From what I can see from the other coast, the revolt against military occupation going on in Los Angeles is escalating. I would have advised the Angelenos to not react to the Guard at all.  As Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, Trump is using the Guard as bait.

By militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms. As I’ve listened to him and his advisers over the past several days, they seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.

He’s been eager for such a confrontation for awhile. I believe he wanted it in his first term, but then he had people around him who had the sense to say no. Now he’s got the likes of Pete Hegseth.

During the George Floyd protests in 2020, Trump was furious at what he saw as the fecklessness of military leaders determined to thwart his attempts to use deadly force against protesters. He’s learned his lesson: This time, he has installed a hapless sycophant at the Pentagon who is itching to execute the boss’s orders.

He thinks sending troops to put down lefties makes him cool. But there’s more to this than just confronting protesters. Trump has a beef with the whole state of California, remember.

Philip Bump writes in WaPo that Trump is going to war with California the same way he’s going to war with Harvard.

What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. His team, The Post reported, was “asking federal employees to develop rationales for the funding cuts” — perhaps looking at conflicts with his executive orders about cutting costs or ending diversity initiatives.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) responded by noting that the state contributes far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. But the point wasn’t really the money. The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel, precisely as it had sought to bring elite universities to heel, similarly by contriving reasons the government might strip funding. The methodology was the same because the intent was the same: inflict pain on an entity that Trump viewed as hostile to his presidency.

So Trump wants to bring California “to heel.” What would that look like? What would make Trump happy with California? Whatever that is, I don’t think deploying some National Guard is going to make it happen. That’s just a first step.

I believe he wants escalation. And the escalation won’t stop with California. Because ultimately what Trump craves is to turn the nation and then the world into a perfect reflection of himself. He wants no disagreement with his beliefs, no doubts of his superior judgment of all things. And just as he wants control of Harvard — he’s seeking “input” into hiring, admissions, and eventually curriculum — he will want control of California and every other city or state he feels is a threat to his authority.. And the Constitution doesn’t give him that.

Robert Reich writes that we are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state. At The Atlantic, David Frum goes even further.

If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control. Or he might suspend voting until, in his opinion, order has been restored. Either way, blue-state seats could be rendered vacant for some time.

Trump hasn’t yet trotted out the Insurrection Act, which he wanted to use in his first term but got no cooperation from most of his staff. He could declare phony emergencies and insurrections everywhere there are majorities of Democratic voters and send in the troops.

And it wouldn’t completely surprise me if he were to try to revoke California’s statehood so that it reverts to being a federal territory. Then he can personally dismiss the entire state government and run the state any way he likes. That’s the only “end game” that would give Trump the victory he wants.

I doubt it’s possible for Trump to feel genuine contentment about anything. If you gave him absolute control over the galaxy he’d still crave more, because that craving is coming from a bottomless hole within himself. There is no filling it. That’s why he’s not going to stop until something stops him. Let’s hope that something involves the due process of law and the Constitution.

Update: Trump has added a Marine battalion to the National Guard in LA. The Guard in LA. haven’t been provided beds or food.

State troops sent to Los Angeles by the Trump administration, without the approval of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, were expected to sleep on floors or outdoors, a source told the Chronicle.

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— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle.com) June 9, 2025 at 2:45 PM