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The Felon Is A Growing Threat At Home and Abroad

In the early hours of Saturday morning, the Felon and his circle of sycophants launched a war of choice against Iran and at this moment the violence appears to be spreading as fighting breaks out in Lebanon, a tanker burns in the Persian Gulf, oil prices are surging , the stock market is falling, and missile strikes have hit Persian Gulf states that host American bases. All of this has happened without congressional approval or any coherent explanation to the American people as to how we went from negotiations just on Thursday and Friday with Iran to open warfare, much less what the end game might be. Frighteningly, no one knows where this may spiral to and how badly the Middle East may be destabilized. Meanwhile, Russia and China are being sent a message that might makes right and that invasion of other nations is acceptable. The Felon is turning the world into a dangerous version of the wild West and spending billions of taxpayer better spent domestically where everyday citizens are struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. Equally concerning are the signs that the Felon would like to resort to a military dictatorship at home with surveillance of Americans citizens and unrestrained ICE agents intimidating the citizenry. What we now are facing is clearly not what racially motivated white MAGA voters thought they were voting for.  A column in the New York Times looks at where we find ourselves. Here are excerpts:

Authoritarian politics and military aggression are a dangerous mix. As Donald Trump announced his war on Iran wearing a baseball cap in a video released in the middle of the night while he was at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, that lesson hung heavily over the proceedings. This was a decision made by one man with no legal basis, little public support and no coherent explanation of an endgame.

Within a few months, Mr. Trump has ordered the military to blow up boats in the Caribbean, abduct the leader of Venezuela and decapitate the government of Iran. The absence of any congressional authorization or campaign to prepare the American people feels intentional. We are not meant to think too much about the basis for action, how much it costs or what happens after the spectacle of bombs falling. Before we digest the last operation, there is the threat of a new one. The dizzying nature of these actions makes them seem routine.

But something has shifted. Mr. Trump now regularly uses the military as an extension of his personal instincts. He may try to keep the operation short. That won’t stave off the consequences. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, the United States has extended its post-9/11 forever war into Iran, an act that will reverberate across the Middle East for years to come.

The immediate questions concern the course of the war. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a brutal and repressive force in the lives of Iranians for decades. His demise hardly resolves the matter of who will control a country of more than 90 million people, particularly as the most heavily armed factions tend to be the most hard-line and are faced with a direct threat to their power and wealth.

The Iranian regime is weakened but still capable of inflicting damage. Strikes at U.S. military facilities and civilian targets from the Gulf States to Israel suggest an initial strategy of trying to redistribute the violence and disruption wrought upon Iran to its neighbors. Attacks on energy infrastructure and shipping could bring those costs to the global economy.

Mr. Trump’s only stated plan for regime change was a call for the Iranian people to rise up. Then what? Those who do may be massacred. Some version of the regime could still cling to power. Iran could devolve into civil conflict, as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya did after the initially triumphant toppling of their leaders. Separatist movements among ethnic minorities could fracture the country and draw in neighboring states. Protracted violence or extreme poverty could lead to a surge of refugees into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and ultimately Europe. There are, of course, better scenarios.

Mr. Trump will surely declare victory in Iran, just as he did last summer. But wars play out in the lives of people and nations, not news cycles. The 1953 U.S. and British-backed coup that enabled the shah to consolidate power in Iran appeared to be a victory, but it became part of the DNA of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Islamic Republic that has bedeviled the United States ever since.

Even those who welcome the decapitation of the Iranian regime may feel deep unease about America’s behavior. The United States, like Israel, now seems to follow no rules, consult few allies and pay little regard to the destruction it leaves behind, including in the prosperous Arab Gulf States. Like an empire of old, it demands tribute — be it Venezuelan oil or payments to the amorphous Board of Peace. Mr. Trump’s tariff policies, maximum pressure sanctions, episodic threats on Greenland and military action are experienced as a strategy of calculated chaos.

What lessons will nations draw from this new reality? For would-be nuclear powers, it is that North Korea’s arsenal brought security that Iran’s negotiations could not. For Russia and China, it is that might makes right. For our European allies, it is that the United States is an unpredictable force that could again threaten Greenland or meddle in their internal politics at any moment. The old U.S.-led order is dead; the new one feels unstable and ominous, as if a storm could descend at any moment.

Mr. Trump likely would not have become president without his stated opposition to forever wars — it is a feature, not a bug, of MAGA. Yet in his return to the presidency, he has proved to be far more interested in power itself. Setting aside the risks outlined above, this dynamic alone should compel stronger and sustained Democratic opposition to this war.

Rather than representing a break from America’s imperial instincts, Mr. Trump has personalized them. There is no reason to believe he won’t lash out militarily again. . . . Cuba is currently being starved by a blockade, despite posing no danger to U.S. national security.

After 25 years of constant war, there is little appetite for this kind of adventurism among the American people. The operations around Venezuela and in Iran are both estimated to cost at least several billion dollars, with more to come. That is not how American taxpayers want their money spent amid a cost-of-living crisis, deep cuts to the social safety net and exploding deficits.

More profoundly, the way Mr. Trump has deployed the newly minted Department of War abroad should raise concerns about what he might do with the military at home. Already he has tried to send troops into American cities, but faced judicial pushback. He has mused about invoking the Insurrection Act, which would grant him emergency powers to deploy the military to enforce laws within the United States. Whether in response to peaceful protests or an election loss, this would put American democracy into dangerous territory.

We must not be numbed to the repeated, illegal use of the United States military. Nor should we discount what Mr. Trump’s extension of the forever war is doing to us.

Foundational questions are at stake for Americans. Do we want to continue forever wars financed with borrowed money and fought by service members whose sacrifices stand in stark contrast to the cowardice of our billionaire class? Do we want to regularly bomb other countries while endangering the lives of millions of human beings by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development? Do we want to remain in a permanent state of war that migrates from one place to another while rampant inequality and revolutionary technologies remake our communities with little resistance?

Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism is not abstract. There is nothing stopping him from wielding the awesome power of the United States to serve his own interests, not the public’s. . . . . The desensitization of Americans to this kind of violence is part of what is broken in our society.

By aligning themselves with public opinion, the Constitution and a sense of shared humanity at home and abroad, Democrats can offer an alternative vision to the forever war. The just and lasting peace that most Americans seek is one in which government responds to their problems, rather than constantly looking for regimes to change or enemies, whether foreign or domestic, to crush. 

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War and Peace Cannot Be Left to The Felon

In the early hours of yesterday, the Felon ordered an attack on Iran and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. The move is a wet dream for Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu who has long wanted the USA to attack Iran.  This action was taken in direct contradiction of the U.S. Constitution which provides that only Congress can declare war, not that the Felon - who clearly views himself as a monarch - cares anything about the Constitution or anything else that restrict his desires to become a dictator/king.   I'm sure much of MAGA - which hates non-whites and non-Christians - is thrilled by the attack on Iran even if they cannot locate Iran on a map of the world. But for the rest of us, the situation should be worrisome. ?Like so many of the Felon's actions, there seems to be little long term planning and calls for "regime change" seem to rely on unarmed Iranian civilians who would be faced off against the heavily armed and brutal Revolutionary Guard.  Given the USA's track record with regime change in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq what could possibly go wrong with this scenario?  A long column in the New York Times argues that no single individual, especially a malignant narcissist with signs of dementia and desperate to distract from the Epstein scandal , should be allowed to take the nation to war.  Here are column excerpts (we will be with Senator Mark Warner this afternoon and I'm sure he will have interesting commentary):

Eight minutes. That’s the length of President Trump’s social media video announcing his war with Iran. He didn’t go to Congress. He didn’t obtain a U.N. Security Council resolution. Instead, he did perhaps the most monarchical thing he’s done in a monarchical second term: He simply ordered America into war.

I take a back seat to no one in my loathing of the Iranian regime. I am not mourning the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike on Saturday. My anger at the Iranian regime is personal. Men I knew and served with during my deployment to Iraq in 2007 and 2008 were killed and gravely injured by Iranian-supplied weapons deployed by Iranian-supported militias.

But my personal feelings don’t override the Constitution, and neither do anyone else’s. . . . . I’m worried that all too many people will say: Well, in a perfect world Trump should have gone to Congress, but what’s done is done. That is exactly the wrong way to approach this war.

Here’s the bottom line: Trump should have gotten congressional approval for striking Iran, or he should not have struck at all. And because he did not obtain congressional approval, he’s diminishing America’s chances for ultimate success and increasing the chances that we make the same mistakes we — and other powerful nations — have made before.

To make that argument is not to sacrifice our national interests on an altar of legal technicalities. Instead, it’s to remind Americans of the very good reasons for our country’s constitutional structure on matters of war and peace.

The fundamental goal of the 1787 Constitution was to establish a republican form of government — and that meant disentangling the traditional powers of the monarch and placing them in different branches of government.

When it came to military affairs, the Constitution separated the power to declare war from the power to command the military. The short way of describing the structure is that America should go to war only at Congress’s direction, but when it does, its armies are commanded by the president. . . . . Our nation cannot go to war until its leaders persuade a majority of Congress that war is in our national interest.

This framework applies both to direct declarations of war and to their close cousin, authorizations for the use of military force, such as the authorizations for Desert Storm in the first gulf war, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq.

But the constitutional structure, when followed, does much more than that. It also helps provide accountability. To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.

I’m getting a disturbing sense of déjà vu for example, from the idea that degrading regime forces from the air will give unarmed (or mostly unarmed) civilian protesters exactly the opening they need to topple the Iranian government and effect regime change. . . . By the end of Desert Storm, the United States had devastated the Iraqi military and inflicted casualties far beyond anything that Israel or the United States has inflicted on Iran this weekend.

When the Iraqi people rose up, there was a wave of hope that the dictator would be deposed and democracy would prevail. But Saddam Hussein had more than enough firepower — and enough loyalists — to crush the rebellion, retain power for more than a decade and kill tens of thousands of his opponents.

The Iranian regime deserves to fall, but I’m concerned that we’re creating the conditions for more massacres of more civilians, without offering the protesters any reasonable prospect of success.

But if the regime does crack, there is no guarantee that we will welcome the eventual results. From Iraq to Syria to Libya, we’ve seen how civil war sows chaos, fosters extremism and terrorism and creates waves of destabilizing migration.

In a real public debate before a real Congress, these points could have been addressed. The administration could have prepared people for the various contingencies, including casualties and economic disruption. Instead, near the end of Trump’s cursory speech on Saturday, he said, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

Well, yes, that’s certainly true. But that’s not the full extent of the risk; not even close.. . . .  There was a case for striking Iran. . . . . But there was also a case against an attack.

As my newsroom colleague Eric Schmitt has reported, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned Trump that there is a high risk of casualties and a risk that a campaign against Iran could deplete American stockpiles of precision weapons — at the exact moment when we need those weapons to deter any potential Chinese maneuvers against Taiwan.

In addition, Iran may now believe that it should not restrain its response to an American attack but instead prioritize inflicting as many casualties as possible on American forces (and perhaps even on American civilians). Iran has already lashed out at multiple nations in the Gulf. Its attacks haven’t inflicted much damage so far, but it’s too soon to simply presume that Iran won’t be able to hurt the United States or our allies.

And if we suffer those losses without eradicating a nuclear program that Trump already claimed to have “obliterated,” without ultimately changing the regime (in spite of the death of the supreme leader), or without even protecting civilian protesters, then for all practical purposes we will have lost a pointless, deadly war.

Now, many millions of Americans are bewildered by events. There is no national consensus around the decision to deploy Americans into harm’s way. There isn’t even a Republican consensus. There’s only a personal consensus, the personal consensus of a mercurial man so detached from reality that he actually reposted on Truth Social an article with the headline “Iran Tried to Interfere in 2020, 2024 Elections to Stop Trump, and Now Faces Renewed War With U.S.”

In 1848, at the close of the Mexican-American War, a first-term congressman named Abraham Lincoln wrote:

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

Those words were true then, and they’re true now. No matter what he thinks, Trump is not a king. But by taking America to war all on his own, he is acting like one.

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The Felon Attacks Iran With No Clear Goal

On Thursday and Friday Hillary and Bill Clinton were dragged before a House committee allegedly investigation the Epstein scandal in what appears to be a Republican effort to distract the media from the Felon's own seeming far, far more serious involvement with Epstein.  Indeed, the Felon's name appears more often in the Epstein files than anyone other than Epstein himself and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.  The GOP stunt seemingly backfired as both Clintons called out for the Felon to Congressional approval be called in next to testify under oath and media attention over the Felon's involvement increased.  So what do you do to distract the media from Epstein coverage? Attack Iran, of course, without clearly enunciated goals and no international coordination except seemingly Israel. Living in an area with a huge presence of military personnel, I know that are sailors and troops are not simply props to be used for political purposes - a concept lost on the Felon who only cares about boosting his ego own or finding a means to distract the media. American lives and Iranian lives will likely be lost - reportedly Iran has launched attacks on American bases in the Middle East (see the image above) - not that the Felon cares. His past statements make it clear that members of the military who die in combat are "losers" in his mind and that real living, breathing individuals are of no matter to hip despite disingenuous lip service to the contrary.  A main editorial in the New York Times looks at what the Felon has launched:

In his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised voters that he would end wars, not start them. Over the past year, he has instead ordered military strikes in seven nations. His appetite for military intervention grows with the eating.

Now he has ordered a new attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran, in cooperation with Israel, and U.S. officials say they expect this attack to be much more extensive than the targeted bombing of nuclear facilities in June. Yet he has offered no credible explanation for why he is risking the lives of our service members and inviting a major reprisal from Iran. Nor has he involved Congress, which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war. He has issued a series of shifting partial justifications, including his sporadic support for the heroic Iranian people protesting their tyrannical government and his demand that Iran forswear its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

That Mr. Trump declared the Iranian nuclear program “obliterated” by the strike in June — a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack — underscores how little regard Mr. Trump has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.

Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare.

The Iranian regime, to be clear, deserves no sympathy. It has wrought misery since its revolution 47 years ago: on its own people, on its neighbors and around the world. It massacred thousands of protesters this year. It imprisons and executes political dissidents. It oppresses women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and religious minorities. Its leaders have impoverished their own citizens while corruptly enriching themselves.

Iran’s government presents a distinct threat because it combines this murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions. Iran has repeatedly defied international inspectors over the years. Since the June attack, the government has shown signs of restarting its pursuit of nuclear weapons technology. American presidents of both parties have rightly made a commitment to preventing Tehran from getting a bomb.

We recognize that fulfilling this commitment could justify military action at some point. . . . recent history demonstrates that military action, for all its awful costs, can have positive consequences.

A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation of the goals — whether they were limited to denying Iran a nuclear weapon or extended to more ambitious aims, like ending its support for terrorist groups — as well as the justification for attacking now. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies.

A responsible approach would also acknowledge the risks that the next conflict with Iran might go less well than the last American attack. Iran remains a heavily militarized country. Its medium-range missiles may have failed to do much damage to Israel last year, but Iran maintains many short-range missiles that could overwhelm any defense system and hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other nearby countries. An attack on Iran risks the lives of American troops, diplomats and other people living in the region.

Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.

He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He has fired senior military leaders for failing to show fealty to his political whims. . . . Mr. Trump shields them from accountability. His administration appears to have violated international law by, among other things, disguising a military plane as a civilian plane and shooting two defenseless sailors who survived an initial attack.

Recognizing Mr. Trump’s irresponsibility, some members of Congress have taken steps to constrain him on Iran. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, and Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, have proposed a resolution meant to prevent Mr. Trump from starting a war without congressional approval. The resolution makes clear that Congress has not authorized an attack on Iran and demands the withdrawal of American troops within 60 days. Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, are sponsoring a similar measure in their chamber.

Mr. Trump’s failure to articulate either goals or a strategy for a potential military intervention has created shocking levels of uncertainty about this attack. Americans do not know whether the president has ordered an attack in their name mostly to set back Iran’s nuclear program — or to go so far as toppling the government of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

If it is the less ambitious of the two goals, it raises an obvious question. Iran will surely rebuild its nuclear program in the years ahead. So is the United States committing itself to a yearslong cycle of military attacks? If it is the more ambitious goal, Mr. Trump has offered no sense of why the world should expect this effort at regime change to end better than the 21st-century attempts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that the military operation has begun, we wish above all for the safety of the American troops charged with conducting it and for the well-being of the many innocent Iranians who have long suffered under their brutal government. We lament that Mr. Trump is not treating war as the grave matter that it is.

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