Strategic Incoherence

 If you are thinking either tactically or especially strategically about something, you have to consider multiple outcomes of every action you take. If you do X, what are the potential outcomes? Which of those outcomes is particularly catastrophic, and are there factors that can remove those catastrophic outcomes? 

You absolutely cannot "wing it" or go with your gut.

Unless you're Donald Trump and the gaggle of sycophants and fools that constitute his inner (and outer) circle.

The goal - such as it is - was apparently regime change. The best opportunity for that was when the people of Iran were being gunned down in the streets in early January. Even then, it was primarily wishful thinking, even magical thinking. The ease of Venezuela clearly influenced Trump, as did the need to reassert dominance domestically and internationally.

The result, so far, has been pretty catastrophic. Apparently, no one really expected Iran to do the thing that we all knew Iran would do: throttle oil supplies. For someone so locked into the world view of the 1970s, Trump's ignorance on this is striking. 

To be clear, this is not about national security. Iran did not pose an immediate threat to the US. We've been mostly containing them for half a century. By threatening regime change, we've removed any constraints on Iranian behavior, as this is an existential conflict for them. Yet, apparently, we went into a war with our goals - regime change on the cheap - completely inadequate to the ability to influence events in Iran.

The final expression of just how unbelievably fucked up the "thinking" is on Iran is this: We are letting Iran export oil and reducing sanctions. We are bombing their country, but we absolutely cannot allow them to stop selling oil to China or China might fuck with us and our plate is kinda full right now. Allowing Iran to sell their oil - hell, allowing Russia to sell their oil - is not in America's national security interest. When you are in a conflict - directly or indirectly in Russia's case - you throttle their economy. You have a PLAN to throttle their economy. 

In World War II, America flew a dangerous and costly mission to bomb the oil facilities in Ploesti, Romania. It was the primary oil facility in Nazi occupied Europe, and it was critical that we use oil as a weapon to deprive their military of a critical resource. Today, we are letting Iranian and Russian oil on the market because Trump knows that rising oil prices are politically perilous for him. The war started out unpopular and it will only get more unpopular as the cost of the war and the price of oil soars ever upwards. 

Turns out having imbeciles running your government is a bad idea.

It's Not The Crime, It's The Cover Up

 The refrain of "it's not the crime, it's the cover up" from the Watergate Era, refers to Nixon's role in covering up the White House involvement in the Watergate Break In. In order to protect the White House in general, Nixon authorized criminal actions to thwart the investigation.

Today, we have something that in many ways is far worse than Watergate, with the Epstein saga. Here, again, we have a clear cover up that creates a visible effect without actually being visible. We don't know what was in the investigation that Senator Wyden uncovered (that Richardson references at the link). What we do know is that there are only two possible explanations for the DOJ's contempt of Congress.

The first and most obvious one is that Trump and/or other members of his administration are all over the files. Wyden's discoveries relate to drug trafficking and money laundering (in addition to the human trafficking that we have been discussing). We know how Trump was always kind of short of money. We know that Trump laundered bribes through his properties - renting or selling above market prices to Russians and others. 

The second, but still plausible explanation is simply that Trump and Bondi and others obstruct for the sake of obstructing. Deny, attack, deny, attack. That's pretty much the single playbook that they use. Never admit weakness, never admit you were wrong. Know that Fox and similar organizations will smooth out the rough edges of your lies. If you cave into Wyden on the money laundering and drug trafficking issue, then you might have to cave on other redacted files.

The problem is that by constantly covering up whatever is in the files, you're allowed for the worst possible information to become plausible. The cover up becomes confirmation of the crimes.

It's The Corruption - An Ongoing Series

 It is a daunting task to try and create a singular line of attack on Donald Trump and MAGA. There is just so much that they do that is transgressive, incompetent, cruel and self-defeating that finding a single tack to take - a central narrative - can be really hard. You can focus on ICE's murderous behavior...but here comes Epstein. Focusing on Epstein? Here comes some racism!

I've argued that corruption needs to be a powerful unifying thread in attacks on Trump. First, because he's easily - and I mean by far - the most corrupt president in the history of the Republic. Harding, Grant, Nixon...they didn't really personally enrich themselves. Trump is making money for himself and his crime family. 

As Krugman points out, there are very, very extensive ties between Trump and the petrostates of the Persian Gulf. There has been a lot written about whether Israel forced us into war, with a lot of that discussion veering quickly into antisemitism. However, the role that Saudi Arabia played has been less focused upon. 

"We went to war for Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the result is that oil companies and oil producing states are going to reap a massive windfall" is a decent line of attack. The "forever wars" rhetoric could founder on the fact that at some point Trump will simply declare victory and go home. I don't think Iran is a "forever war"; it's the expenditure of tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars to make oil producers rich - just like his ban on renewable energy is to make oil producers rich.

Anger at rising gas prices will translate into anger at Exxon and Shell and Gulf. Link that to Trump via the corrupt self-dealing that is exemplified in everything that orange fucker does.

Does Trump Meet The Qualifications For Psychosis?

 It's not exactly a specious question. He seems so incredibly detached from reality.

However, Trump's manifest and repeated lying is a personality trait. He simply cannot tell a truth that might reflect poorly on himself. The Iran war is pretty much already won, but Europe needs to send help immediately to reopen the Straits of Hormuz, which are open anyway. Tell me how that is the utterings of a sane person. Then again, he has always simply lied about everything. Prices are down! He won in a landslide! The world respects us!

At what point does his repeated inability to tell the truth reach the level of psychosis? Particularly since he has absolutely no one around him who will tell him the truth.

There has been reams written about the sanewashing that the media does for Trump. They treat his utterances as somehow true or they frame them in a way that might make sense. Trump can say something that sure seems false, but it is accorded the weight that we normally give presidential statements. Then, inevitably, the truth is different than what Trump said, but the media has already moved on. Then he says something else that, again, is treated as true.

Trump's ramblings - if not filtered through this media screen - would seem to be so detached from actual reality that it would call into question whether Trump understands what is actually real. You know. Psychosis.

We've typically understood Trump as being a liar, a profoundly ignorant even stupid man and a man clearly slipping into cognitive decline, perhaps full on dementia. I have to wonder if all those dementia tests that he passed - but that his doctors feel the need to repeatedly administer - are perhaps something that needs to be a screen for actual psychosis.

We have reached the point where we don't know if the President of the United States is capable of interacting with reality.

Back Home

 Anyone volunteer to help Donny Small Fingers out of his jam in the Straits of Hormuz?

The Board of Peace?

His friend Putin?

Anyone?

Bueller?

Maybe shitting on all our allies and then launching a war of choice was a bad idea, actually.

Healthy Lifestyle

 There are a lot of heath benefits to living in Europe/Spain. Certainly, we have walked A LOT. We eat smaller meals. The food is less processed.

But I've also been consuming less news, and that's been a blessing.

Of course, come tomorrow or Tuesday, I'll be back at it. I do wonder about the Ariana Grande Voter - that lump of barely sentient clay who tunes into elections every four years and votes their feelings. These are people who are going to be surprised when food prices rise because the Strait of Hormuz are closed and that will have a massive impact of fertilizer prices which will be passed on to consumers by the fall.

Everything is a genuine surprise to these people, but even in my relative cocoon the war is on the background.

Greeting From Spain

 Once again, it is striking how much more beautiful Europe's urban public spaces are than ours are in the United States. I'm not 100% sure if this is a legacy of imperial grandeur and therefore inherently anti-democratic or a values system that prioritizes public goods that is inherently very democratic.

Anyway, Spain is beautiful even in March.

The Adults In The Room

 In 2016, many Republicans - when faced with the grotesquerie that is Donald Trump - assured themselves that the "adults in the room" would restrain his worst, most venal impulses. Every time Trump did something egregious, this concept of "adults in the room" was widely mocked.

When he ran again in 2024, many warned that Trump 2.0 would not have even those few voices of reason that had apparently constrained him during his first term. 

What we are seeing in Iran is a vivid example of what happens when you put people like Pete Hegseth in charge of a massive bureaucracy like the Pentagon and then have him running around doing workouts with the troops rather than soberly (ahem) considering the impact of military policy. Trump Unleashed was catnip to his cultists, but it's already resulted in the murders of three Americans by state security forces, crashing the post-Covid recovery with tariffs and macroeconomic uncertainty, measles outbreaks, widespread, staggering amounts of corruption and the wrecking of a global system of alliances that has largely prevented Great Power conflict.

This was, of course, predictable and predicted. 

I'm going to be moving around a bit, not sure how much content I'll be providing for the next week. 

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.

Spiraling

 I've mentioned Josh Marshall's theory that all politics are unitary. If you suffer a setback on the economy, that effects the way people view your ability in other areas. Roughly speaking this is about governing legitimacy. Jimmy Carter was elected because he was bracingly honest after Vietnam and Watergate. He was undone by some of his own actions, but largely because of events in the...wait for it...Middle East, especially Iran. 

If we look at Trump's polling on Iran, we can see it's really unpopular for being in the first days of a military conflict. Perhaps - as many have argued - that this is because Trump never made the case for striking Iran. Another argument is that he's simply lost the support of the majority of the American people and no matter what he does, it will be unpopular because he's unpopular. 

Now, we have rising gas prices, and that tends to impact all sorts of prices. We also have a bad jobs report, both the number we lost in February and the revision downwards for December and January. Trump's firing of the head of BLS might get your a favorable tilt on initial reports, but the revisions will typically be downwards, when the data is more concrete. People have been worried about the economy in ways that the data suggested didn't make sense, but perhaps that soft job market that crept in after the chaos of Liberation Day tariff-palooza really was on people's minds.

The "affordability" crisis is certainly not going to be helped by Trump's war in Iran. Trump's numbers on the economy were already bad, and then he goes off in all of his speeches about how things are actually great, and have you seen these drapes? People were getting pissed about the economy before Trump launched a war that very predictably has spiked oil prices. 

Meanwhile, yesterday, Trump finally fired a Cabinet official when the overwhelming corruption of Kristi Noem became too much even for Republicans on the Hill to stomach. Of course, being Trump he nominated Markwayne Mullion, arguably the stupidest member of Congress, but a scalp is a scalp. Noem no doubt thought she could get away with cheating on her husband on the taxpayer's dime, funneling money to cronies and killing American citizens in the street, because Trump would protect her.

Surprise!

If you're Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth, just know that once you become a liability in his eyes, he will cast you over the side before you can blink. 

Republicans are fleeing from Congress and dropping out of their re-election bids, because they can see the coming catastrophe. Trump - stupid, senile and arrogant - will refuse to accept his many setbacks. 

He's spiraling, and he will continue to spiral.

Dire Straits

 Josh Marshall has been tracking the impact of Iran's threats to shipping through the Straits of Hormuz. Basically, there was no planning and insurance carriers can't insure all these ships.

This basic level of fuck up is exactly what we should expect from an administration of Fox News rejects, podcasters and mediocre white supremacists. Any idiot could have predicted that Iran would close the Straits, just like any idiot could have predicted that American citizens (and others) might not want to be stranded in a war zone. In Afghanistan, the collapse was so fast and unpredictable that there probably wasn't anything that could be done. This was a war of choice being planned for weeks, if not months. 

And apparently no one considered the fact that Iran might strike back at the Straits or at commercial air traffic?

Fucking morons.

Talarico

 James Talarico won the Democratic primary to challenge for the Senate seat in November. Democrats have been waiting years to win statewide in Texas, but there are signs that maybe...maybe...this could be the year. 

There are a few important reasons.

- Republicans are in disarray. Cornyn and the scandal magnet Ken Paxton will go to a bruising runoff. If Paxton knocks off Cornyn, the seat can be considered a true toss-up. Paxton is super MAGA-ish, so it's entirely possible he succeeds in the runoff.

- Hispanics are fleeing the GOP. Democrats always assumed that what seemed to them to be pretty racist statements and policies from Trump and the GOP would drive Hispanic voters to Democrats. It hadn't happened. That was before Trump 2.0, with Stephen Miller's pogroms unleashed everywhere.

- Talarico seems a better fit with Texas. Crockett is a cable news star and brilliant at invective and the sort of insurgent politics that people say they want from Democrats. Her theory of the election - that there were a ton of un-mobilized Democratic votes - is almost always wrong. Talarico talks like the Sunday School teacher that he is. He's a calming presence. He believes in persuading people fed up with Trump's chaos and corruption to switch sides. This seems key in mobilizing those Hispanic voters.

- Turnout will, in fact, matter, but not in the way Crockett hypothesized. Talarico's job is to get suburban college educated voters and Hispanics to switch from the GOP to him. Democrats - and we have ample evidence for this - will crawl over broken glass to vote this November. Republicans? Especially some of those irregular Trump voters? The various factions of the Trump coalition who feel betrayed - by Epstein, by Iran, by MAHA, by the economic promises - they don't have to vote for Talarico. They just have to stay home.

This is why I think Talarico is such a good pick, because there would have been Republican voters who would have gone to the polls to vote AGAINST Jasmine Crockett, but with MAGA collapsing along with Trump's mental faculties, they can just stay the hell home. 

I think that's the key in all sorts of races, like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, North Carolina and maybe even some surprising states like South Carolina or Kansas. If Republicans are just dispirited and don't vote, that counts, too.

The Contingency Of History

 Martin Longman runs through a connection I had not known about. A critical moment in the history of Iran was the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, as it is often difficult to retain a revolutionary ideology after the charismatic leader of that revolution dies. It's what Max Weber referred to as the "routinization of charisma" and it's hard to pull off.

The logical successor to Khomeini was Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri. He was the most senior and respected cleric in Iran, and Khomeini's ideology required that the most senior cleric by in charge of the rule by religious authority. There was an friend of Montazeri named Mehdi Hashemi who was a complete asshole and got sideways of Khomeini, and that blew up in Montazeri's face.

I knew that this had happened, but I didn't know about Hashemi's role in this.

The reason this is important is that Montazeri was not completely wedded to the idea of the velayat-e faqih or rule by religious authority. He certainly wasn't a fan of trying to export the Iranian Revolution.

Ali Khamenei was.

In the span before his death, Khomeini worked with Ali Rafsanjanah - a nakedly cynical man - to elevate Khamenei over Montazeri. Khamenei was a revolutionary ideologue and Iran continued down the path that now has it as a pariah state at war with all of its neighbors.

I believe that history is largely about big forces, but individuals matter. What would have happened, for instance, if James Comey doesn't announce his investigation in Hillary Clinton's emails and/or the Stormy Daniels story gets out in October of 2016. What happens if Clinton wins is pretty obvious. Donald Trump never sniffs public office and America and the world is in a better place.

Incoherent America

 Lots of work is being done around the realization that Americans don't hold truly ideological or even informed opinions about politics. Because the world is complicated, people's opinion of things can shift depending on how you ask them. That's how you get a slim majority rejecting "amnesty" and a sizable majority supporting a "path to citizenship." 

Perhaps one of Trump's political strengths is how well he mirrors this inchoate, unexamined, almost thoughtless approach to politics and policies. Trump's shifting explanations for war against Iran are not going to win him any real converts to his war of choice, but they DO reflect the way many Americans respond to political dilemmas, often taking a position and then retroactively finding a justification. A person could be xenophobic. Why? Jobs! No, access to public goods! No, crime! No, disease! No, actually it's jobs again!

Good policy is not guaranteed by good process. You can have a perfectly reasoned and coherent case for war and it is still likely to be a bad policy. (That doesn't mean having a terrible case will work either.)

What it does suggest is that the most ideological people have a flawed view of other people's politics. If you believe people are as ideologically focused as you are, you will presume that ideological appeals will win their votes. You just need the pitch perfect 12 point plan and suddenly everyone will vote for your program. Take Project 2025 (please). The more these reactionary ideologues wrote down what they were going to do, the less popular it was. The fact that Trump is governing from the blueprint that he expressly disavowed is one reason why he's so far underwater.

Lots of the terminally online Millennials hate Bill Clinton, but there is a reason why he was so popular. Same with Obama. They were capable and pragmatic. Yes, as partisan politicians they had Things They Wanted To Do, but they weren't eager to couch them in ideological terms.

One of the most deleterious developments in American politics has been the severe ideological sorting of the parties since the 1990s. This means that they people at the head of our politics are often captured by ideological thinking in ways that obstruct winning elections. Given that one party has dived headlong into authoritarian patrimonialism if not fascism, I'd say winning elections is important.

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.