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The GOP Meltdown Over Iran May Be Beginning

As the Felon's war of choice against Iran continues to expand, global energy prices soar (include gas prices in the USA), tens of thousands of Americans are trapped in the Middle East, and the American public still has yet received a consistent message as to why the Felon moved to attack Iran and what the end goal is, cracks within the GOP/MAGA base are beginning to show.  Some right wing talking heads are claiming Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu was the real decision maker and that the USA went to war at Israel's bidding.  Polls show the war is very unpopular outside of the GOP base and suggest that the Felon's already abysmal approval ratings may fall even further even as signs point to a disastrous 2026 mid-terms cycle for Republicans.  If American casualties increase in numbers and gasoline and/or other  prices spike in the USA, there may be more complaining from the MAGA/GOP base that the Felon has betrayed his campaign promises and that he is definitely not putting "America First."  A piece in the New Republic looks at voices on the right that are condemning the Felon's war of choice.  Here are excerpts: 

On Monday, two days after the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran, Megyn Kelly began her SiriusXM show by saying she was praying for American troops, as well as mourning the U.S. servicemembers who already had been killed by retaliatory strikes. But she quickly shifted gears, questioning why soldiers have to “put their lives on the line… for whom, again?”

My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States,” she said. “I think they died for Iran or for Israel…. Our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or for Israel. It’s to look out for us.”

Kelly is far from alone. Tucker Carlson on Saturday called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil,” and in a lengthy video on Monday said, “It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here. [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu did.” . . . In more extreme corners, the white supremacist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes urged his followers not to vote in the midterms over the war—or otherwise vote for Democrats. Steve Bannon, Trump’s svengali during his 2016 campaign and now a top MAGA podcaster, referred to the war as a “betrayal.”

It’s tempting to call this a MAGA civil war, though that’s not quite right. Even though a huge majority of the country as a whole opposes the war with Iran, a CNN poll found 77 percent of Republicans support it—and there is little sign yet of Trump losing the support of congressional Republicans in particular. Still, it is a crack-up and a serious one, especially given the GOP’s dire outlook for the midterm elections. It points to Trump’s diminishing grip on his own movement.

Kelly, Carlson, and Bannon have all criticized Trump before, and they’ve all gotten back in line later. But less than a week in, this war already threatens to drag on for weeks—if not months or, as Trump floated on Monday, “forever.” If it does drag on, it will become even less popular, including among Republicans. Facing sustained criticism from the MAGA faithful who rightly see the war as a “betrayal,” Trump could well spiral into unprecedented territory.

Trump has beat back the conservative intelligentsia before. But that’s not really what he’s facing right now. One reason why Trump was able to defeat the eggheads at National Review was by empowering other figures who embraced him. In many cases, these people backfilled the intellectual void in the MAGA movement. Trump was anti-immigration, anti-free trade, and loosely anti-interventionist; people like Bannon and Carlson took those loose parameters and fleshed them out.

Of course, most of the MAGA movement is still whatever Trump says it is. MAGA is Trump—not Carlson or Bannon and certainly not Megyn Kelly or lower-level critics of the Iran War like Matt Walsh, a loudmouth who makes Kelly look like Jurgen Habermas. But Trump’s resilience stems in party from his ability to craft alliances with disparate—and often contradictory—parts of the Republican coalition. His incoherence and stunning lack of command over policy basics made him attractive to both neoconservatives and isolationists. His seeming preference for extremely aggressive but limited military operations abroad—like the assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020 or the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, could ostensibly satisfy people in every camp. These were bold, illegal, dangerous moves. But they weren’t accompanied by calls for regime change or the extended deployment of U.S. troops.

We’re now witnessing what may be the beginning of a regional war. Whether U.S. troops will deployed on the ground is anyone’s guess, but this war will hang over Trump’s presidency regardless.

Trump and Netanyahu have made a mess of the entire Middle East in only a few days—Iran is bombing Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and several other Gulf States. The U.S. has instructed hundreds of thousands of civilians to leave the region, even though it has left them to fend from themselves as Iranian bombs fall on airports. It’s still not clear who will emerge to lead Iran in the wake of Khamenei death, nor what type of leader or government would be deemed acceptable to Israel or the United States.

Trump, it’s worth saying, is doing all of this while he is historically unpopular and his party is facing what may turn out to be the biggest midterm massacre since 2006. But what happens when he is even more unpopular, overseeing a foreign war that’s out of control, and no longer has control of Congress? What happens when the subpoenas and investigations—and yes, impeachments—start? What happens if this becomes a regional war? What happens if U.S. civilians, stranded in a Gulf state, are taken hostage? What happens if U.S. ground forces start aiding one, or several, factions in an Iranian civil war?

These are all plausible scenarios, given the state of play in this very moment: Republicans in Congress are holding on to control by a thread, Trump’s approval rating is plummeting to new depths, and this war is already spinning out of control. The administration has no plan for what comes next; hell, it doesn’t even have a plan for evacuating the hundreds of thousands of U.S. civilians who are stuck in the Middle East. But Trump is also unprepared politically—for the exodus of support from Republican voters and lawmakers alike if this war expands and ground troops are deployed. He says “MAGA is Trump.” Before too long, that may be pretty much all that MAGA is.

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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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