Pawns

 One of Trump's defining character traits is a complete lack of empathy to the point of sociopathy. He cannot see other people except as they exist to be utilized by him. 

His recent comments about the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln can be filed in the massive folder "Things That Would End Any Other Politician's Career." He has trapped himself within his ignorance surrounding the Iran War, but while he's "suffering" from cratering approval ratings, the sailors floating off the coast of Iran are truly suffering. Soldiers based in the Middle East are dying and being wounded by Iranian attacks. For Trump, though, their suffering is irrelevant. He needs a way to declare victory over Iran and if the troops suffer, well, they're just "suckers" anyway for volunteering.

Just a hateful human being, and I use the term human being loosely.

It should also be said that sailors and soldiers will endure a lot. If the mission is broadly legitimate. This one is not, and that has to weigh on the service members.

Bliss...Until It Isn't

 One of the nice things about the trip we were on was that I didn't feel compelled to read my writers every day. I didn't need to process all the hot takes and sage musings that I usually do. Driving through the Colorado high country, I could just take it all in and enjoy the company of friends and family.

It strikes me that this is how most Americans live and it must be nice. Sure, there are times when things seem really bad, and you don't have the cognitive architecture to process and understand it, but most of the time, a certain amount of ignorance really is blissful.

I did peek in on Krugman's shorter pieces, and it was interesting the theme of the past week has been just how damaging ignorance can be when it typifies the people in charge of government. Two examples that Krugman cites are the willful ignorance (or more like obstinate refusal to acknowledge facts) around climate change and the lying ignorance around the Iran war. 

Of course, you can't have any of this without the signature fact of the age: Donald Trump is a deeply stupid and damaged man. He has then surrounded himself with other deeply stupid people and smart people who make themselves stupid to twist themselves into courtiers to sate the omnivorous ego of this awful fucking man. 

The bizarre spectacle of the Fauci obsession is another brick in this towering edifice of stupidity. Anthony Fauci - and really the whole communicable disease community - were groping in the dark in the early days of Covid. They erred on the side of caution, but the stupidity and lack of leadership of Donald Trump and the fever swamps of right wing and woo woo conspiracy sites made Covid something it wasn't. "It's just the flu." 

In the end, over a million Americans died earlier than they otherwise would have because of Covid. If things like masking where taken seriously, that number would be lower. If people took the vaccine, that number would be lower. America had one of the worst records during Covid, because we were led by deeply stupid people in the early days of the pandemic, and because right wingers politicized it. 

People will point to the closing of schools as being a mistake, because kids rarely died from Covid (How many dead kids would have been too many?). This neglects that teachers - many of them older - were also part of school communities. 

All Fauci did was try and save lives. His caution and the desperate need for Covid to be a "lab leak" made him out to be a villain. Six years later, he's being dragged before Rand Paul because RFK, Jr. searched every file to find his personal diary - a diary that does nothing to discredit his decision making. 

One of the conversations we had in Colorado was with an old friend who works in the tech sector. He said he read a definition of intelligence that was basically: the ability to make predictions. I have been thinking about intelligence as a concept, and I came up with four different levels of intelligence.

The first is "Training" or simply the ability to be trained. A dog can be house trained, and a kid can be trained in spelling. The second is "Knowledge." This is the ability to recall information. Again, a dog can remember where her favorite plushie toy is, and a kid can remember the French word for toy. The third level is - with a nod to my friend - "Prediction" or "Analysis". Can you use knowledge and your mental training to predict things or draw meaningful connections? The final level is "Wisdom". Do you know the true value of things - not its price, its value?

When I think about the Trumpist movement - extending beyond Trump himself to his whole movement - I can see some Training, but when it comes to Knowledge they are so warped in what they "know" because they just don't want to understand the complexity of the world. They don't value complexity. 

This is how you get the Iran War. This is how you get inflationary tariffs. This is how you get a tariff on Canada for not raking their forests. 

The root of populism is that any person is as good as any other person and therefore rule by elites - especially cognitive elites or experts - is disdained in favor of putting loyalists into positions of authority and even in the implementation of policy.

It's stupid and it's degrading this country a little bit every single day. 

Fascism

 During Trump's first term, I tried very hard to avoid using the term "fascist" to describe his presidency. I felt that he was a patrimonial authoritarian, and to a certain degree, I still hold that belief. Trump believes that the state should exist as an extension of his will and as a means to his personal enrichment. The state should reflect glory and power onto him. I also felt that many of the creatures around him are, in fact, fascist.

At this point - as Richardson so capably catalogs - any plausible argument that Trump is not a fascist has evaporated. The change might be because he's been marinating the increasingly crazed world of people like Stephen Miller and the echo chamber of Fox News. Trump has always denigrated his enemies, but now he's dehumanizing them, and that is the first step on a very, very dark journey. 

His unhinged speech last night and the eager willingness of Markwayne Mullin to threaten to illegal imprison state election officials gives us a pretty clear picture of where things are headed. Republicans must be getting slaughtered in their internal polling, because they aren't even making a case to win elections fair and square. I think they hoped that their gerrymandering would prevent a Blue Wave, but that plan seems to be unravelling on them.

I honestly don't know how successful they can be in finally destroying American democratic governance, but I do know that if Democrats don't win control of at least one, but preferably both chambers of Congress, we are mightily fucked. 

Institutional Serial Killer

 According to Richardson's research, ICE is responsible for killing 10 people on the streets of America. In ICE run detention centers - outside of the public eye - another 21 people have died this year.

The tactical decision to throw the outright Nazi, Greg Bovino, out the door has reduced the rhetorical temperature and some of the more egregious public displays of force in American cities. This has not meant a change in culture within Trump's Brown Shirts. They can't help but feel that they are immune to public accountability, as the killers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are still shielded from the consequences of their actions.

The killing yesterday of Juan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine is a sadly typical extrajudicial killing for ICE. They targeted the wrong person based on appearance - a Kavanaugh Stop - and then got trigger happy. Guerrero was shot in the head in front of his 3 year old daughter. Guerrero is legally able to work in the US, but for the Nazis like Stephen Miller, it is not his legal status but his skin color that makes him a target. His crime was not crossing a line on a map without paperwork, but being brown skinned.

It is worth noting that this happened in Maine. Susan Collins will not have the luxury of facing a rapist with a Nazi tattoo. Maine Democrats will select a replacement soon, but Collins will have to go before the voters of Maine and explain her support for an organization that has killed 31 people in about six months. 

According to the Gestapo's own statistics, there have been 9 killings (including manslaughter) by undocumented aliens so far this year. From 2023-25, the number ranged from 23 to 29. That means ICE is responsible for more deaths than the so-called "dangerous aliens" that they have purportedly mobilized against. At this pace, they will extinguish the lives of about 60 human beings, which is an par with the worst surge of violence committed by undocumented people during the crisis of 2021-2.

ICE is often compared to a criminal gang, but I also think they are like an institutional serial killer. They operate across geographic distance to dilute their crimes, they prey on a certain ethnic group, they escape accountability for far too long.

We are governed by psychopaths. 

The Cost Of Incompetence

 I've argued repeatedly that an underrated peril of Trump and the general Republican Party being able to control government is the long slow (and now accelerating) erosion of governing competence. Martin Longman makes the case that Lindsay Graham - despite his myriad flaws and failings - was one of the final pillars of the GOP that had at least some vague desire to keep the lights on.

Now cometh the pestilence. Typical GOP stupidity looks at basic health and food safety measures as communism or something, so we gut the agencies responsible for preventing screwworm or hamstring the ability of the relevant agencies to track foodborne illness. Trump has always governed like a Facebook rant from your crazy uncle but now he's doing shit like opening up drilling and mining in endangered habitats, which is just venomous, but also likely really stupid.  Same goes with the various cuts to public health measures: Who exactly is asking for this shit?

You can be "pro-business" and still assume that government regulation is possible and necessary. One of the ideas about regulation that the Progressive Movement argued for was that it would create a level playing field where everyone would follow the same rules. Now there are no rules and no reason not for some businesses to engage in a mass rush to the bottom.

So, if you're keeping track, under Trump we have had three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. We have had the Pale Horse of death under Covid; the Red Horse of war in Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere, and now the Black Horse of famine is saddling up. 

The White Horse, is the Anti-Christ, a charismatic figure who will corrupt the world, so maybe we've had all Four. 

Trump's War On Competence

 Krugman makes the case for how Trump and Hegseth's racism and misogyny have undermined military competence and readiness. The case against Trump is that he sees the military as a form of brute strength that he can use as an extension of his personal whims. It's not just the success of the Venezuela raid, but the need to surround himself with men in uniform. (Happy Pride Month, Donald.)

With Hegseth, you get a bully's understanding of military strength: How many pushups can you even do, bruh? As Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated during the Ukraine War, drones are the future of warfare, but Hegseth being dismissive of that threat is largely how we stumbled into a humiliating defeat against Iran (and how Russia is sliding into defeat against Ukraine).

Meanwhile, the Washington Post remembered that it used to be an excellent newspaper and did a deeply researched story on outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard's membership in a cult. (The Post does still suck, as it puts its' stories behind a paywall; a smart paper would give that article away.) Gabbard was always rumored to be pro-Putin and pro-Assad puppet, but I wonder how much of that was because of the cult she was in. It's a weird Hindu cult, where the leader does not appear to be Hindi. Yet there are strains of Hindutva in the virulent anti-Islamic bigotry. India has also had an unusually close relationship with Russia over the decades, though Russia's behavior in Ukraine has strained that.

Gabbard and Hegseth got their jobs because Trump liked the way they looked and spoke on TV. Gabbard is photogenic, and I guess Hegseth is, too. (Your mileage may vary.) Gabbard was a "Democrat" who spoke ill of Democrats, and Hegseth was a blustering bully from Fox. They had very little qualifications for the actual jobs that they hold and now we have lost a war to Iran and we have no idea the damage Gabbard has done to American intelligence operations and capacity.

Elect a stupid clown, get a stupid circus.

Blood For Oil

 WAAAAAY back in 1990, as the United States gathered together a coalition backed by the United Nations to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty after Saddam Hussein invaded that country, the antiwar Left held rallies crying "No Blood For Oil." That never seemed persuasive to me, as we could have bought oil from Iraq as easily as Kuwait. In fact, I guarantee that's what Trump would have done. Bush 41 was a true internationalist and institutionalist, and he wanted to restore the purpose to the UN and the luster to American arms. He more or less accomplished both. 

However, now that Trump is president, we have a clear case of him moving towards a literal "blood for oil" scenario. Trump really got a kick out of his video game heroics in Venezuela, and a bunch of cronies and Netanyahu convinced him that a similar outcome was in the offering in Iran.

It was not.

This has now led us into a dangerous impasse. America has struck more or less what it could strike and damaged a lot of Iranian leadership and military hardware. Iran, however, has already placed many of its eggs in the drone basket that is changing 21st century warfare. Iran also has decided that it can weather the very real economic pain that the war if creating in Iran, whereas the Americans cannot. A lot of this is because this war was never explained to Americans and never supported by us. You can ask people to sacrifice, but there must be a Glorious Cause to enlist their sacrifices. 

Trump, meanwhile, has of course telegraphed his next move, because he's a senile old dipshit that can't resist opening his festering gob. He is considering an attack on Kharg Island. This would certainly hurt Iran, but it will lead to significant American casualties. 

In Venezuela, he was able to pull off an almost bloodless operation that deposed a dictator and replaced him with a dictator that will follow Trump's lead. It is completely plausible - almost inevitable - that we find out that Americans close to Trump and Trump himself are profiting off Venezuelan oil. Sending US ground troops to Kharg would be another oil grab. Pure and simple.

Now, this operation could conceivably force Iran to negotiate in earnest - if they felt they could trust the US, which they do not. More likely hundreds of Americans will die, thousands will be wounded, Iran will hunker down, oil will spike to $150 a barrel, Americans will be pissed, no one will bail Trump out from a quagmire of his own making and...Yeah, that's the most likely outcome. America takes the island with many dead and it solves nothing in the short term.

Trump was sold another Venezuela: quick strike, profit! Instead, he's being mugged by reality. He's too dumb (with a "b") to understand that, so he's liable to be manipulated by the evil and stupid people around him to make this even worse.

No, He's Responsible

 Yglesias writes a decent column about Trump's war on government competence, best exemplified by DOGE. He notes how cuts to various agricultural and public health programs are running into real world consequences, notably screwworm, measles and Ebola. Yet, he then says that some of this isn't "Trump's fault." His argument is that - unlike the disastrous war against Iran - these are not direct policy consequences. Trump didn't CAUSE screwworm or measles or Ebola to exist.

I honestly don't even know how you get yourself into that rhetorical space. 

Krugman - famously called "shrill" by his editors - tends to lean the other way. He makes a much more expansive case for things like the problems farmers are having because of Trump's trade policies and that same war in Iran. Of course, many of those deep rural voters are both upset with Trump's policies that have actively immiserated them, but they are also unlikely to vote for Democrats. 

Leaving aside the fact that they won't switch parties, let's look at how they won't hold Trump accountable. Elections are how you hold elected officials and indeed all the organs of government accountable. It is precisely this accountability that makes democracies more functional in the long run - even if they short run is messy as hell.

If farmers are pissed about Trump's policies, then they should vote for Democrats to force a course correction. However, if you start adopting Yglesias' framing of Trump not being responsible for shit that happens even though he gutted the institutions designed to keep that shit from happening on to your head, then you can make the easy walk to "both sides are to blame, I guess I'll just keep voting Republican."

I realize Yglesias is not a partisan propagandist, but technically neither is Krugman. They both purport to be part of the "reality based community." At school, we are urged to practice scrupulous non-partisanship, but Donald Trump IS a felon, and pointing that out - or that tariffs and wars are inflationary - is not being partisan. 

We have a measles and screwworm outbreak in this country, because Donald Trump and the Republican Party have waged war on technical expertise and government capacity. Yes, he didn't actively infect kids with measles or cows with screwworm, but his policies are making this a growing health and economic crisis.

There is simply something very strange about how Yglesias frames his political discussions, and excusing Trump for the destruction of public health measures because he didn't cause the illness is top of the list in strangeness. 

Does The Truth Matter?

 The current situation in the Persian Gulf is objectively very bad for the world. It represents a strategic defeat for the United States. Trump and Hegseth and the professional liars in their employ will assert instead a "great victory."  Oil prices will likely continue to fluctuate as global markets have to process the wild ping-ponging movement of oil out of the Gulf and the slow return of that oil to global markets.

The political question of high gas prices is a tricky question. There are likely some benefits to bringing down gas prices, and they don't really respond to actual supply, it seems, but rather the prospect of future supplies. Tankers take weeks to get from the Gulf to refineries then weeks more to get to the pump. Yet the price at the pump seems to change daily dependent on which lies Trump is spouting at any given moment.

The question of whether this ceasefire will actually lead to peace is one that Trump can't spin. If we start shooting again, that's not something he can lie about. If we capitulate, Trump will simply lie and say we won, and if gas prices fall, then the average dipshit voter might very well believe him. If energy prices stay high, and the impact of our defeat over control of the Straits grows in the public consciousness - the way the collapse in Afghanistan did - then Trump's collapse will continue to his floor of 27%. 

If he reaches that, Democrats win the Senate. Perhaps comfortably.

Oh, and Melania decided to bring up Epstein again, so that looms over everything, too. 

The Madman Theory

 During the late stages of Nixon's presidency, they hit upon a negotiating gambit called the Madman Theory. The idea was to convey to the Vietnamese that Nixon had lost his mind and could start nuking North Vietnam in his madness. The idea was to force the North Vietnamese to accept a timetable that would allow the US to leave Vietnam and not have the sort of chaos that we saw, for instance, when we evacuated Kabul. Didn't work, but there was at least a gap.

When you read Richardson or Aaron Rupar's transcription of Trump's inane babblings, it's tempting to see this as a reinvigoration of the Madman Gambit. The problem is, it seems far more likely that he really is fucking bonkers. The insane tableau of Trump mumbling about Iran with the Easter Bunny standing next to him while kids wait to do an Easter egg roll is...I don't think we have the words to describe it. If he's faking it, we can skip his quest for the Nobel Prize and give him an Oscar.

Garrett Graff and Martin Longman concur that nuclear weapons are likely not off the table. That doesn't mean that Trump's current rhetorical escalation should be taken at face value. His threats to end Iranian civilization could mean just further bluster in an attempt to bring them to the table or the crazy son of a bitch could be considering nuclear weapons. I personally doubt it, because he's expressed a certain fear of the awfulness of nuclear weapons, but he really seems deranged and certainly creatures like Pete Hegseth are not going to rein him in.

Is there someone around him who can impress upon him that he will become a Hitler-level monster if he launches nukes at Iran? Would he care? I think - possibly - he might. But this is a guy who wanted to nuke North Korea in 2017 and a hurricane shortly thereafter. 

If only America had a separate branch of government, say a legislature, some sort of Congress, we might be spared this looming tragedy.

UPDATE: He TACO'd. He's claiming that Iran has a workable plan. I'm skeptical until I hear it from Iran.  

I trust Iran to be more truthful than the President of the United States. Also? Two weeks? He just keeps playing the same old hits. 

Terrorism or Errorism?

 Krugman calls Trump a terrorist, using the definition of the Department of Homeland Security. He notes that terrorism is a tactic, not a goal, and that terrorists are usually those who cannot achieve their goals via conventional conflict. Trump's threats to blow up bridges and power plants - as threats - make him a terrorist.

Richardson's view is a bit more nuanced. She notes that Trump is just careening about and this is likely just more bluster. He has a habit of making these crazed threats and then backing down. The problem is that Iran has likely clued into this pattern and will not budge. She does, however, note that early in Trump 1.0, he wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea and was talked out of it by his generals. He also famously wanted to nuke a hurricane at one point. Perhaps...perhaps...he got the message that nuclear weapons are not toys or magic wands, but does anyone think there are the same sort of professional soldiers in the highest ranks of the military to tell him, no?

I don't think Trump will use nuclear weapons in Iran, but I do think it represents an escalation in rhetoric intended to scare Iran to negotiate. I also worry that while Trump does have a tendency to TACO his threats - he bullies and blusters but then backs down - he's clearly deranged in his thinking these days and has fewer constraints from those around him.

The solution to this war will not come from Washington or Tehran or Riyadh. Some other power will need to host talks to get both sides - led by crazed zealots - to climb down. China would seem to be a interesting choice. Xi has seen his primary global rival repeatedly light itself on fire by electing this dumb fucker twice. He has watched Trump blow up 75 years of American global leadership. If he could negotiate an end to this war, it would be more than the US self-immolating, it would be a positive act of Chinese global leadership.

China - unlike, say Russia - requires the global stability that the US used to provide. Their trade depends on open sea lanes and stable contract laws. While I'm sure they are enjoying America's decline under Trump, if they want to avoid being caught in the vortex of that collapse they will need to step up.

It would be hilarious if Xi - a murderous autocrat - were to win Trump's coveted Nobel Peace Prize by finding an ending to Trump's stupid-assed war. 

The President's Easter Message

 Easter, for Christians, is a moment to reflect on the sacrifice of Jesus. According to the Christian faith, Jesus was the literal son of God who willingly let himself suffer execution on the cross - a fate reserved for pretty horrible criminals - in order to redeem the sins of man. 

Trump's Easter message was to threaten war crimes against Iran. Attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime. I suppose he's stopped threatening water desalination plants, but that's likely because his Gulf allies depend on desalination more than Iran does. Josh Marshall feels that right now it is Saudi ruler Mohammad bin Salman who is perpetuating the war. If the US packs up and leaves, they will be left to handle the crisis in the Straits of Hormuz. I suppose even more cynically, high gas prices will help the Gulf states in the long run.

Trump has disappeared from the public eye and has not retreated to his safe space of Mar A Lago for the holiday weekend. He tends to do this around the start of every month. The assumption is that he is getting intravenous treatments, most likely for dementia. This is the source of the blotches on the back of his hand. Certainly, his address a few nights ago suggested a man in poor health.

Trump is facing a narcissistic decompression, as his manifest incompetence and stupidity (and the incompetence and stupidity of those around him) has created a situation that he cannot simply walk away from. 

So, Donald Trump - avatar of the White Christian Nationalist movement - threatens war crimes as his Easter message, further abasing the office of the President and the reputation of the nation that ostensibly he serves.

Surprised By The Unsurprising

 Anyone with the sense Dog gave a Labrador retriever would have known that Iran would strangle the Straits of Hormuz. Anyone with the sense that Dog gave a guinea pig would have known that there are thousands of Americans and other nationals in the Gulf and they might want to be evacuated.

When people say that we "rushed" to war with Iran, we do know mean that this was a last minute decision. it certainly seems like this was weeks in the planning. It is precisely the incoherence and incompetence of this "plan" that has sober people concerned. Iran has likely been planning for this since last June, but really for decades. It is not clear that Trump and his crew of podcasters and Fox News personalities have done anything but dust off some old Pentagon contingency plans.

This has led to Trump apparently brow beating oil executives to bring down prices of a global commodity that he has just imperiled. "I've cocked things up, but I'm relying on you guys to fix it." Apparently, he didn't even bother to refill the strategic oil reserve before launching this war.

If anything, our latest foray into the chaos of the Middle East should remind us that renewable energy is not just environmentally sound, but it makes sense in terms of economics and national security.

The Politics Of Trump's War

 It is inevitable that any discussion of the conflict in Iran turn to the impact on Trump and his political fortunes. Especially given the fact that a Democratic Wave in the November elections might be the difference between America surviving as a democracy or not.

Trump's inherent incoherence is going to work against him here. As he tosses out contradictory war aims and negotiating positions, it becomes clear he doesn't have a framework for "winning the war." What's more, Trump made no effort to "sell" the war to the American public. He did not use the State of the Union address to make the case; he only tossed out a few videos on his social media site. He did not engage Congress or the American people in this conflict. It seems that he assumed he would get a quick and clean Venezuelan outcome - neglecting the fact that Venezuela is still a mess.

Americans don't seem pleased with this. YouGov threw out a snap poll (take with a grain of salt) and only 34% of Americans supported the war. In March 2003, 71% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, largely because the Bush Administration made a relentless (and flawed and mendacious) case to the American public. Republicans naturally support Trump far more than Democrats, but while 10% of Democrats express any support for the war, only 20% of independents do. Democrats oppose the strikes at 70%, but independents oppose it at 52%. 

Trump never made the case for war, and now he's throwing off bangers like "there will likely be more (casualties) before it ends. That's the way it is." He routinely references Venezuela, "What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario." He thinks he can waltz in and out of a Middle Eastern war, the way he did in the Caribbean, which betrays an unsurprising but woeful level of ignorance.

Meanwhile, Iran's closing the Straits of Hormuz is unlikely to make people think that Trump is laser focused on affordability. It might not crater the economy the way the 1979 Iranian Revolution did, but supply chain disruptions have a way of making themselves felt. One driver of the "Biden" Inflation was the supply chain disruption to world oil and gas markets by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is no reason to believe that we won't see another oil shock, even if it doesn't tip us into stagflation.

Trump is an idiot. Most of the people around him are idiots. They believe in performing on social media over doing the hard work of crafting policy and long term strategy. "The Venezuelan raid went great, let's do that again. It will make great TV." Except the American people are really not at all ready for this, and they made no effort to prepare them for it.

Trump has no reservoir of good will or public trust to draw on, beyond his diminishing base. He is absolutely incapable of filling the role of selfless war time president. I would be shocked if he met the caskets of fallen soldiers at Dover. What's more, it is precisely his rural voter base that is sick and tired of these wars, because they disproportionately fight them. 

Iran is playing the long game, because it must. It can launch swarms of cheap drones until America's supply of anti-missile weapons is gone. If it resorts to tactics that have served it in the past, one would have to expect terrorist attacks at some point. They merely have to hunker down and endure. 

Trump is talking about a four week war. Venezuela might be instructive here, in that we really haven't changed much about the government of Venezuela, except who sits atop it. But we declared victory and moved on. Maybe we see a bunch more dead people - American, Iranian, Israeli, Qatari, Kuwaiti - we degrade the Iranian military...and then the war just ends. It's pretty clear that Trump has no real plan to make "regime change" happen. 

I would be shocked if Trump benefits from a "rally 'round the flag" effect. 

Special Military Operation

 The seemingly inevitable attacks on Iran began a few hours ago. The two ideas need to be held together in everyone's mind. The first is that the Iranian regime is incredibly malevolent. The second is that air strikes are not going to topple the regime. 

Is there a realistic endgame for these strikes? Almost certainly not. 

Are we at war with Iran? Not technically, because Congress has been excluded from this decision. Only Congress can declare war.

Why are we doing this? This feels like the Trump Administration's incessant efforts to "create content" and "project strength" rather than any overarching strategic goal.

Would it improve the world if the Iran had a new government? Absolutely. There is no evidence that this will topple the regime. Air power can't do that.

Can't a global military power enforce it's will militarily on a weaker power? History suggests not. 

Are the adults in charge? Absolutely not. Epic Fury? We are governed by middle schoolers.

Is this a distraction from the Epstein Files? Maybe, but more likely it's a distraction from the various setbacks that Trump has been dealt recently. Military action is usually a way to restore presidential authority. This seems unlikely to do that.

Are We About To Go To War With Iran?

 Seems like it. But as Cheryl Rofer notes, it's quite difficult to graft rational decision making onto Trump's governance. I have been struck by how out in the open these military plans are. The movement of massive amounts of airpower to the Middle East has not been subtle. Surprise is not apparently the operative word here.

Maybe he is just trying to bully Iran into some form of concession on...something. It certainly seems like his fundamental demand is that Iran no longer be a sovereign power hostile to the United States. As with so much of Trump's blinkered grasp of the world, he seems mired in the '70s and '80s where Iran is this supreme villain that must be squashed, perhaps by Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. Iran does have a terrible regime, but as with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, that seems insufficient for embarking on a land war in Asia.

Why?

Is it Epstein Distraction 2,853? Maybe.

I do wonder if Trump is so clearly declining that the creatures around him are basically running wild through the Executive Branch like toddlers jacked up on sugar and, for some reason, Red Bull. That particular cadre of retrograde Republican militarists who just like to explode shit and think it's realpolitik are basically free to do what "common sense foreign policy" says they should do: drop a few million dollars worth of bombs and cruise missiles, which will make the Ayatollah abdicate in fear. I think their inspiration was a Twisted Sister video from 1984.

The Iranian military is mostly a decrepit joke at this point, though they might luck into shooting down an American airplane and that won't be bad at all. A ground invasion? Good lord.

A reminder that Very Savvy Journalists felt that Trump was the "Peace Candidate" in 2016.

UPDATE: Looks like we're effectively at war with Cuba, and I didn't even know it. This has Rubio all over it.

UPDATE II: Given that SCOTUS has just show down his tariff bullshit, I would expect him to channel his rage into missile strikes.

The Damage Done

 The sheer amount of damage that Trump and Republicans are doing to the world is tough to keep track of. Certainly, millions of people - many of them children - are going to die because they killed USAID. Other outrages - putting his name on the Kennedy Center - are easily fixed. Reversing his budgets are done in 2029 (presuming we still have a democracy by then). He is increasingly toxic, and as Minnesota demonstrated, when the people stand against him, he loses.

There are two areas that were especially galling yesterday. 

Trump basically went all in in dragging the power grid back to 1947. By repealing every single piece of constraint on emitting greenhouse gases, he is paving the way for massive amounts of pollution. The question, though, is really whether companies will actively move backwards on this. Yes, the massive open coal pits of Wyoming will continue to feed the data centers being built there. However, some tech companies are more eager to build small scale nuclear plants, because they have to know that once Trump is gone, coal will no longer be viable. It's not viable now, due to cost, not "woke."

Why is he doing this? To pwn the libs? In return for payoffs from hydrocarbon companies? However, if you're Ford or GM, do you really want to fall behind the rest of the world as they spring towards more hybrids and EVs? 

We also have the baffling (but not baffling) decision to simply not review the efficacy of mRNA flu vaccines. This is RFK, Jr's war on vaccines that everyone with half a brain saw coming. The US already takes longer than Europe to approve new drugs and treatments. Now, we have a really promising new form of vaccine and it's being killed to placate the roughly 20% of Americans who are skeptical of vaccines, a 20% that resides overwhelmingly now in the Republican Party.

Europe will no doubt plow ahead with medical advances, but the US is ceding that ground and it has been the US that has usually been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs, which is really the only possible defense for our expensive health care system. Our medical care costs too much in order to fund medical research and treatments. Now, we are destroying that, too. 

All of this is just an inconceivably stupid catering to unbelievably stupid people. 

Providing Democrats win in November, businesses will have to evaluate what the end of Trump and Trumpism might mean for them. I can't imagine the executive that will greenlight a coal burning power plant, knowing that it will never be profitable and won't even come online before Trump is out of office. Hopefully, medical research will simply relocate overseas so that science can progress during our sojourn in the America where race science is more popular with the government than actual science. 

So much awfulness everywhere you look. 

It's Not Going To Get Better

 While I've argued that we have to celebrate the small victories, like Greg Bovino getting canned, that should not obscure the fact that the authoritarian march of Trump is not abating. They and the Republican Party is more or less committed to his project of turning America in a competitive authoritarian state, like Hungary. They might try and round off some rough edges, like shooting people in the back on the street, and they will seize any opportunity to try and rally their base, but it sure seems like we have reached a tipping point.

Things are not going to get better on their own, and may in fact get worse in the short run.

At this point, I'm back to actively rooting for some sort of massive own goal, like an economic collapse or the leaking of those damned Epstein Files.

Taking The W

 Yesterday, I predicted that Bovino would make an easy scapegoat for the catastrophic invasion of Minneapolis. Guess what? 

So, yeah, I take this as a personal win, but I think the Very Online Left needs to understand that you have to take your wins and celebrate them. Twitter was full of people saying "This is not enough. Miller and Noem have to go, too." 

Sure! I would LOVE that. But in a long campaign, you have to celebrate the wins you have. That's what allows you to build momentum. It's not enough just to record the win, you have to celebrate it. At the same time, you actually don't want to go overboard, because that could make Trump react in the opposite direction. Just don't crap all over the victory. 

Maybe?

 During the Iraq debacle, some idiot claimed that they were seeing "green shoots" of stability in the country racked by civil war. It's the same sort of thing I feel today, when I see the response to the state execution of Alex Pretti. The man was a literal Boy Scout, a literal choirboy. As Krugman notes, he is not being subjected to the same character assassination as Renee Good, who had the audacity to be a queer woman who didn't defer to the Big Strong Man sufficiently. Yglesias, who has developed a real knack for Steelmanning the indefensible, is actually unable to make the case for this bullshit. We are starting to see "unnamed sources close to the President" begin to ask very real questions about what is going on.

The videos of Pretti's murder are disturbing, but that is precisely the point. (I cannot fathom what his parents must thing, having to see the murder of their seemingly extraordinary son plastered across screens around America and the world.) The video makes it impossible for the Trump Administration to lie - or rather it has made it impossible for them to lie in a way that is defensible except by the hardest core of MAGA. 

Josh Marshall made the point about "escalation dominance" that clearly motivates Miller, Noem, Bovino and Lewandowski. They are "content creators" in our descent to fascism. 

They want the video.

Right up until they don't.

As of this moment, the GOP is fracturing over this issue. The public is appalled. They can try and push the narrative of Pretti having a gun on him, but that only infuriates the Second Amendment crowd. 

Trump believes in dominance politics, and his sending in shock troops and Brown Shirts to terrorize Minneapolis is an expression of that. 

He is also fickle and self-centered. If he sees this (if his addled brain is capable of taking in new information) and thinks "This is hurting me", then he will jettison people soon. If I had to guess that Lilliputian Martinet, Greg Bovino, would make an easy sacrifice. I wouldn't feel safe if I were Noem either, but Bovino is even more of an aesthetic embarrassment than Noem, as Trump doesn't like short little guys but like women who have butchered their faces for the male gaze. Seriously, I think that's it.

If Trump DOES throw aside Noem, I would absolutely expect her to go scorched earth, the way Marjorie Traitor Greene did. These are awful people - narcissistic, insecure, cruel - and they will turn on each other in a feral display of their own barbarism.

This is not "the end of Trump" and likely not even the end of Stephen Miller, despite him being the true architect of all this. However, we know Trump will case aside those he feels do not reflect well on him. This could be the moment when we begin to see them turn on each other.

I'm not necessarily optimistic, because after the initial outrage ends, the GOP will fall dutifully in-line. Still, it could be a start. Trump backed down over Greenland; he could back down here.