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Americans Are Paying the Price for the Myth of Trump’s Competence

Oil prices are soaring - oil has hit $110 per barrel and is rising - the stock markets around the world are falling, American consumer prices are rising as is inflation, and new job creation is abysmal.  On top of this, America is blowing through close to a $1 billion per day in Iran and munitions supplies are falling. All of this disaster is thanks to the Felon and his circle of incompetent sycophants who make up his cabinet - Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense/War is frightening - and the bootlickers in the Republican Party.  One has to wonder if some in the MAGA base are belatedly beginning to realize that the cost of "owning the libs" and pushing white supremacy and privilege is perhaps far higher than they anticipated. As icing on the cake, report are that Russia is aiding Iran in targeting American troops and assets, something the Felon is ignoring.  Perhaps gas at or over $5.00/gallon may soon have some of the big pickup driving MAGA bubbas screaming and questioning whether killing Muslims has been worth the cost, but I will not be holding my breath..  A piece at The New Republic looks at the myth of the Felon's competence.  Here are excerpts:

At some point, early Wednesday morning, the cost of the Iran War will top $10 billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a paper last week pegging the cost of this latest misadventure at $891 million a day. I’ve seen higher estimates, but CSIS is a respected nonpartisan outfit, so let’s go with their number for now. The report states that the vast majority of this money had not been previously budgeted, especially the spending on munitions. One Patriot interceptor missile costs close to $4 million, and we’re apparently burning through them. And “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth promises that we’re just getting revved up.

Donald Trump may have told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the weekend that the war was “already won.” But also over the weekend, a pre-war intelligence report was leaked to two Washington Post reporters showing that the National Intelligence Council, a panel of independent intel experts, seems to think that dislodging the regime could take a very long time indeed—at $37 million an hour, a rate that is almost sure to rise, especially if ground troops get involved.

Meanwhile, gas prices went up about 60 cents a gallon in the war’s first week. The Dow fell 453 points Friday. (It’s well below 50,000 now, so I guess that means, per Pam Bondi, that we’re now allowed to take the Jeffrey Epstein scandal seriously.) Also on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. In the year-and-change since Trump returned to office, the economy has added around 140,000 jobs. In a year. The St. Louis Fed estimated last spring that simply to keep pace with the growth in the number of people who age into the labor force, the economy needs to add around 150,000 jobs a month. In other words, everywhere you look, the news isn’t merely bad. It’s terrible.

We’ve seen numerous examples in these last 13 months of Trump’s mendacity and malevolence. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will never see him that way. There are those who adore him unconditionally, but beyond these dead-enders, there are others who know he’s not a good person but aren’t all that bothered by it.

That’s hard for millions of us to accept. But I hope to God that these people are finally starting to move themselves toward the conclusion that, even if they aren’t that troubled by the mendacity and malevolence, the man is just wildly incompetent. A mountain range of mythmaking has gone into creating the Trump persona over the years; by him, by a pliant business press in his real-estate days, and, since he entered politics, by a right-wing media that would make the old Soviet press agencies blush and a party of cowardly sycophants, most of whom know very well that he shouldn’t be in charge of a high-volume McDonald’s let alone the executive branch of the federal government but would rather let the country collapse than say so. . . . . And I was staggered during the 2024 campaign at all the voters who believed him when he said he’d bring down prices on day one.

Really. Who is that—okay, I’ll supply my own word—stupid? Presidents can’t control prices. Prices—of eggs, beef, oil, refrigerators, computers, you name it—depend on dozens of factors. Xi Jinping, who runs a command economy in a country where most electronics happen to be made, probably has far more control over the prices of refrigerators and computers than any president ever will. The price of beef has more to do with decisions made in Brazil than in Texas—and certainly at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We all learn this in school. So how did so many millions of Americans unlearn it?

Trump is going around now talking as if he has the power to appoint Iran’s next leader, as if it’s no more complicated than naming the next GOP chairman of Mississippi. As if there won’t be factions within the Iranian populace that will fight the elevation of anyone with the taint of a Trump association to the death.  Again, who can possibly believe his nonsense?

His poll numbers are bad. But they’re not nearly as bad as they ought to be. The man is, whatever his other faults, just way in over his head. Maybe Democrats should say that more often. The fact that he’s costing taxpayers a billion dollars a day on a war most of them didn’t want may be a good place to start.

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The Economy’s Warning Light Is Flashing Yellow

MAGA voters and others who voted for the Felon have claimed they voted for the Felon due to concerns about the economy - rather than admit it was the normalization of racism and/or promises that right wing "Christians" would be able to trample on the rights of others that truly attracted them - should be waking up to the reality that the Felon has taken a relative good economy and is running it into a ditch.  Between the Felon's insane tariffs which have increased prices and caused businesses to cut spend due to the new economic uncertainty , cuts to the federal work force and slashing spending put in place by the Biden administration, almost all of the economic indicators are headed in the wrong direction. Now, the Felon's war of choice against Iran is poised to potentially trigger an oil crisis akin to what hit the nation in 1973.  While the Felon continues to claim that the issue of affordability is a "hoax" and that with a war underway "some people die," anyone truly concerned about the economy and the economic struggles of average Americans ought to realize that the Felon has been a disaster for the economy save perhaps those running private concentration camps and manufacturing munitions.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the darkening economic cloud:

The job market is weakening, inflation is still too high, and we’re at serious risk of a once-in-50-years oil shock. This is almost the exact set of conditions that triggered the stagflation of the 1970s, which at the time was America’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. At the moment, the economy is still far from that kind of doomsday scenario, but the direction of travel is disquieting. The economy’s warning lights might not yet be flashing red, but they are certainly flashing yellow.

The jobs report released this morning showed that the U.S. labor market lost 92,000 jobs in February, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 4.4 percent. The numbers for the previous two months, which had suggested decent job growth, were also revised downward: January now showed fewer job gains than initially estimated and December showed overall job losses. These new numbers continue the trend of last month’s revisions, which showed that the economy had added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, a tenth of the jobs that had been added the year prior. Taken together, the numbers suggest that 2025 appears to have had the most months with negative job growth since 2010—the midst of the Great Recession—and that 2026 is off to a similarly slow start. . . . . the native-born unemployment rate has risen by half a percentage point since Trump took office.

The labor market is not the only sign of trouble. A report released by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis on February 20 showed that economic growth slowed dramatically in the final months of last year, from 4.4 percent in the third quarter down to just 1.4 percent, bringing total yearly growth to its lowest level since the pandemic decimated the economy in 2020.

The worst job numbers since the Great Recession, the slowest economic growth since COVID, and the worst inflation in nearly two years—these are not the signs of a healthy economy. And we haven’t even talked about oil yet.

As I wrote this morning, the U.S.-Iran war carries a very high risk of triggering an energy crisis if it lasts for more than a few weeks—the kind of crisis that experts believe could cause the price of oil to double or triple from its current level. That risk jumped almost immediately after my article was published, when Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the war would not end without Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” The price of crude oil promptly shot up to about $90 a barrel and may go higher still. Meanwhile, Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, has begun warning that oil prices could rise as high as $150 a barrel within weeks and that the situation could “could bring down the economies of the world.” As recently as yesterday, the oil markets were responding relatively calmly to the outbreak of war. Now panic might be setting in.

All of this looks eerily similar to the 1970s. At the beginning of the decade, the economy was already struggling. . . . . Then came the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and everything fell apart. Oil prices nearly quadrupled from late 1973 to early 1974. Because so much of the economy is dependent on energy, that caused the price of everything else to go up too. Inflation reached double digits. Meanwhile, consumers pulled back from spending, which, in turn, forced businesses to start laying off workers, setting off a vicious cycle. Economic growth plummeted, unemployment spiked, and the economy fell into recession.

The current situation is not yet 1973 all over again, and it doesn’t have to be. The biggest difference between the situation then and the one we face now is that this time the pain is mostly self-inflicted. When Trump came into office, inflation was falling, job creation was strong, and the economy was projected to grow quickly. Only after the imposition of his global tariffs did things take a turn for the worse, and only after his decision to wage war on Iran did the world face the prospect of a full-blown energy crisis.

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What Does Russia Have on Trump?

As the Iran war continues - a war of choice on the part of the Felon - oil prices soar, American citizens remain firmly against the war, and fears of a wider conflict grow, there are now reports that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to aid in targeting American bases, facilities and war ships. What does the Felon do? He eases sanctions against Russia to allow increased Russian oil exports which, of course will aid Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine.  The AP reports as follows:

Russia has provided Iran with information that could help Tehran strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region, according to two officials familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter.

The officials, who were not authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, cautioned that the U.S. intelligence has not uncovered that Russia is directing Iran on what to do with the information as the U.S. and Israel continue their bombardment and Iran fires retaliatory salvos at American assets and allies in the Persian Gulf.

[The Felon] Trump on Friday evening berated a reporter for raising the matter when he opened the floor to questions from the media at the end of a White House meeting . . . . White House officials downplayed the reports, but did not deny that Russia was sharing intelligence with Iran about U.S. targets in the region.

Like many, I have long suspected that Russia - and likely Israel as well - has blackmail information on the Felon.  This "kompromat" may have been gained by Russia itself when the Felon visited Russia in the past with salacious rumors about what Russia might have on video that the Felon does not want released.  The other possibility, of course is that Russia and Israel either received from Jeffrey Epstein or hacked damaging information, photos and or video with which they can now use to blackmail the Felon.  Much of what the Felon's regime has done has weakened - perhaps deliberately - America's standing in the world both through illegal tariffs and the alienation of allies of many decades.  Overall, the tariffs have trigger and decline in manufacturing jobs, job creation has been flat for the last six months, and now oil and gas prices are soaring and consumer prices continue to rise. None of this has "made America great again."  In a piece at Substack, Adam Kinzinger asks again the question of what Russia has on the Felon:

For years I’ve tried to avoid the easy question that floats around American politics. It’s the one people ask quietly in private conversations and loudly on cable news panels: what exactly does Russia have on Donald Trump? I’ve generally resisted going there because speculation is cheap and politics already has enough of it. Accusations without proof often become just another partisan talking point. But there comes a moment when a pattern becomes so obvious that refusing to even ask the question starts to feel dishonest. Today feels like one of those moments.

According to reporting from U.S. officials, Russia has been providing Iran with intelligence about the location of American military assets in the Middle East. That reportedly includes the positions of American ships and aircraft operating in the region. If that reporting is accurate, it means a hostile nuclear power is helping another hostile regime track American forces in the middle of an already volatile conflict. That is not some abstract geopolitical game. Those positions represent real Americans wearing the uniform. They represent the sons and daughters of families across the country who volunteered to serve and who depend on their government to protect them as they do their jobs.

What makes this moment even harder to understand is what happened at the same time. The same day these reports surfaced, the administration moved to ease restrictions that had been limiting Russian oil sales on global markets. The explanation was that it would stabilize energy supplies and help calm international markets. Maybe that calculation has an economic logic behind it, but it sends a strategic signal that is impossible to ignore. Russia is reportedly assisting a regime that has spent decades arming proxies against American troops, and the United States responds by making it easier for Russia to earn billions in oil revenue.

That contradiction is staggering. In any normal national security environment, a report that Russia was helping Iran identify American military targets would trigger a fierce bipartisan response. Congress would demand answers. Sanctions would tighten, not loosen. Intelligence agencies would be pushed to confirm what is happening and policymakers would act accordingly. Instead, the message Moscow hears is something entirely different. Russia can escalate its hostility toward the United States and still receive economic relief from Washington.

It forces a question that many Americans have been asking for years, sometimes out of frustration and sometimes out of genuine confusion. Why does Donald Trump consistently treat Vladimir Putin with a level of deference that he rarely shows to democratic allies? Over the past decade we have watched Russia interfere in American elections, wage cyber warfare against Western institutions, and invade Ukraine in a brutal war aimed at wiping a democratic country off the map. Each of those actions alone should have triggered sustained pressure from the United States. Instead, we repeatedly see hesitation and accommodation.

Now we may be looking at something even more alarming. If Russia is helping Iran track American military assets, that means Moscow is actively assisting a regime that has American blood on its hands. Iranian-backed militias have been responsible for the deaths of U.S. service members throughout the Middle East for years. When I flew missions in Iraq, everyone in uniform understood that Iranian support to militias was one of the reasons American troops faced constant danger. The idea that Russia would now help Iran in ways that could endanger American forces again should be a red line for any administration.

At the very same moment this is happening, Ukraine is offering something remarkable. After years of defending itself against Iranian-made Shahed drones used by Russia to terrorize Ukrainian cities, Ukraine has developed some of the most effective counter-drone tactics in the world. Ukrainian officials have offered to share those capabilities with the United States and our allies so we can better defend against the same technology. Think about the contrast in that moment. Ukraine, a country fighting for its survival against Russian aggression, is offering help to protect American forces. Russia, the aggressor in that war, is reportedly helping Iran gather intelligence that could put those same forces at risk.

Yet the policy signal coming out of Washington appears to reward Russia economically rather than punish it strategically. That leaves Americans wondering whether our leadership understands the basic alignment of friends and adversaries anymore. For decades the United States built alliances that made the democratic world stronger. We worked with partners who shared our interests and pushed back against regimes that threatened global stability. The current approach often seems to blur that line.

This is why the uncomfortable question keeps resurfacing. What does Russia have on Donald Trump? It is not a question people ask lightly, and it is not one that should be thrown around casually. But when the United States repeatedly responds to Russian aggression with restraint or accommodation, it becomes harder to ignore the pattern.

There is also a deeper issue at stake. The world watches how the United States responds to challenges. When adversaries see hesitation in the face of direct hostility, they interpret it as weakness. When allies see Washington reward the very powers that threaten them, they begin to question whether American leadership is still reliable. Strategic credibility is not something you can rebuild overnight once it erodes.

At some point the United States has to draw a line and make it clear that helping our enemies target American forces is unacceptable. Russia cannot simultaneously act against U.S. interests and expect economic concessions from the same government it is undermining. If these reports about Russian assistance to Iran are true, the response should be immediate and decisive. American troops deserve nothing less.

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Is The Felon's Fantasy About to Come Crashing Down?

It's another day and America is still at war against Iran. Oil and gas prices are up, thousands of travelers remain stranded in the Persian Gulf region,  and the Felon still appears to have no plan for and end goal or exit strategy.  Besides having no consistent explanation for why the Felon launched the war of choice, there is likewise no consistent answer as to what would make the reckless war a "success."  The Felon, America's would be monarch, seemingly believes that if he orders something or wants something to be true, all other actors should obey his orders and whims. Objective reality is meaningless in the Felon's fantasy world.  But in wars, things often do not go as planned and other actors, including enemies, have their own agendas and will simply not bow to the Felon.   If this war drags on - the Felon said it could go on "forever" - the economic consequences will be felt around the world, including by American consumers, some of whom claim to have voted for the Felon due to his lies about lowering prices.  Like WWI, the disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq, what are envisioned as short wars can turn into protracted conflicts with no go means of exiting.  A piece in the New York Times at how the Felon's Iran fantasy could come crashing down:

In Donald Trump’s fantasy world, America is invincible and impregnable.  Its military is so advanced and skillful that it can pluck a sitting head of state from a hostile country and deposit him in a New York City jail cell without losing a single soldier. It can slap punitive tariffs on any nation it likes, abandon longstanding alliances on a whim, bomb any country at any time and freely blow up boats it may suspect of carrying drugs. America’s awesome power means it is unfettered by any rules, untroubled by any consequences. As an unfathomably rich and sprawling nation, blessed by geography and protected from its enemies by two vast oceans, why shouldn’t it do what it will?

Over the past six days, as Trump plunged the United States into a war with Iran, that fantasy of omnipotence has come crashing into reality. Undertaken for unexplained and perhaps unexplainable reasons, the war is being waged in a central node of the global economy against a disciplined, well-armed opponent with nothing to lose.

America and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a dozen Iranian leaders on the first day of fighting, but Trump has clearly given little thought to what comes next. Recklessly, he has ignited a widening conflagration with no obvious end in sight. The death toll has already surpassed 1,000 people.

For America, the repercussions are just beginning. At least six American service members have been killed, and the Pentagon, pointedly not ruling out boots on the ground, has said more casualties are likely. Despite relentless attacks on Iran’s military installations, the country has responded with relentless force.

It has rained missiles and drones not only on American and Israeli targets but also on the Gulf countries — the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia chief among them — that play host to American military bases. Airports, hotels, data centers and energy infrastructure have been struck, causing chaos. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial choke point for the export of oil and gas, is all but closed, sending shudders through energy markets.

This is the world Trump tries to disavow — complex and interconnected, resiliently interwoven and yet vulnerable to disruption. The Gulf embodies it like no other place. An apotheosis of globalization, it is a crossroads of money, people and power deeply intertwined with not just America’s fortunes but also Trump’s personal wealth. More than anything, it shows up — in its grounded flights, shuttered refineries and intercepted missiles — the fallacy of Fortress America.

Trump neither sought nor received congressional approval, much less international support, for his war. But perhaps the most shocking thing about his cavalier approach is that he seems to have had no idea the Gulf would be a target. In an interview with CNN on Monday, he professed that Iran’s attacks on American allies in the Gulf were “probably the biggest surprise” — despite the fact that just about every country in the region had warned his administration that Iran would surely attack them in retaliation for an American assault.

This thoughtlessness is part of a pattern. For one thing, the Trump administration has given no plausible explanation for the war, offering instead confused and contradictory justifications. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even suggested that America was effectively bounced into it by the prospect of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran.

For another, Trump appears strangely uncertain about where the war is heading. “The worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” Trump mused on Tuesday, seated in his gilded Oval Office . . .

It is unsettling how often Trump affects astonishing indifference, as though the most powerful man in the world were merely a spectator to events he himself has set in motion — and who in any case has little investment in the outcome. But that curious passivity reveals a darker truth. Trump seems to believe that he, like his fantasy America, exists on a different plane, utterly untouchable by the swirl of global events. The devastating consequences of his actions are not just someone else’s fault. They are someone else’s problem, too.

That illusion cannot survive contact with material reality. The postwar consensus was built partly on a set of noble ideas about human rights and international law, but in truth its backstop was economic interdependence. And not since World War II has there been a conflict that unfolded in a crucial global financial center. America’s major wars since then took place in nations that were on the economic periphery: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

There is the oil and gas, of course. The Gulf is home to about half of the world’s proven reserves of oil. Those are now imperiled: Scarcely any ships are getting through the Strait of Hormuz, and oil producers are running out of storage space. What’s more, one-fifth of the world’s liquid natural gas comes through the strait, primarily from Qatar. On Wednesday, the country shut down its liquefaction facilities and declared a force majeure, with potentially dire implications for importers in Europe and East Asia.

Yet alongside this resource wealth, Gulf nations have rapidly diversified in recent decades, transforming the region into a center of finance, aviation, technology and tourism, as well as a home to tens of millions of people from across the globe. . . . . . The closure of their airports has not only stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers, including many Americans, but also severed vital links between vast regions of the world.

Indeed, there are few people who would have better reason to appreciate the Gulf’s centrality than Trump. After all, his family’s company has struck billions of dollars of real estate deals in the region. His son-in-law Jared Kushner got $2 billion in 2022 from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund for his private equity company. An investment firm tied to the U.A.E. purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company for $500 million just days before Trump’s inauguration last year. A few months later, Qatar gave Trump the lavish gift of a gilded Boeing 747.

That is all in peril now, as the war spreads ominously. On Tuesday, America torpedoed an Iranian warship with a crew of an estimated 180 people on board off the coast of Sri Lanka, more than 2,000 miles from Tehran. On Wednesday, NATO forces shot down a missile headed into Turkey’s airspace, prompting anxieties about NATO needing to trigger Article 5. On Thursday, Azerbaijan said multiple drones crossed its borders, injuring at least two people. Who knows what will be next.

And yet Trump presses on, declaring at one point that the war could go on “forever.” In a manic briefing on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised “death and destruction from the sky all day long” over Tehran, a densely populated city of about 10 million people.

If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, perhaps it will also serve as a lesson to Trump. It should be a simple one: Other places and other people are real, possessing their own agendas and agency — and America’s actions have consequences it cannot control. Anything else is pure fantasy.

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Trump, a/k/a The Felon Has Lost the Plot in Iran

Both outsiders and some speaking anonymously from with in the Felon's regime believe there was too little planning and no clear long term objective for the Felon's war of choice against Iran. Between the Felon and his love of using the military as a prop and the delusional Pete Hegseth who seems to be acting as if he is playing a video game (he doesn't even want the media reporting on American military deaths), American citizens have been offered no consistent justification for the war.  Worse yet, it is becoming increasingly obvious that other than some kind of vague desire for regime change with no real plan, the Felon has offered no clear goal and end game. If the Felon believed that killing the top Iranian leadership would suddenly yield a reformed Iran, he definitely ignored the lesson that the Iraq should have writ large.  As the war continues, oil prices continue to rise, the CIA is reportedly trying to arm Kurdish insurgents, and fears that the war will widen, the Felon clearly has no rational, thought through exit strategy.  Where this all goes at this point is unclear other than the reality that the Felon lost control of the long term plot.  A piece in The Atlantic  looks at the concerning situation. Here are highlights:

Like many of his predecessors over the past five decades,  [the Felon]Donald Trump risks having his presidency hijacked by Iran. The 1979 revolution and subsequent hostage crisis ended Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The Iran-Contra affair tainted Ronald Reagan’s. Iranian machinations in postwar Iraq sabotaged George W. Bush’s. The Iran nuclear deal—and the bitter partisan fight over it—consumed the second half of Barack Obama’s presidency. The October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, a member of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” triggered a brutal war that subsumed Joe Biden’s. Trump may have envisioned a second term spent striking deals to resolve wars, but Iran has now sucked him in, too.

What Trump seems to have hoped would be a Venezuela redux—a quick decapitation of the regime followed by a swift deal with the leader’s successor—has deteriorated into a regional war. Tehran telegraphed that this would happen, but it still apparently caught Trump by surprise. Now the United States is approaching a quagmire as news reports suggest that the CIA is arming Kurdish groups inside Iran.

In Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez—who concurrently oversaw the ministry of petroleum and the ministry of economy and finance while serving as vice president—maintained deep foreign connections, including a private back channel to the Trump administration even before President Nicolás Maduro’s capture. Her willingness to meet with CIA Director John Ratcliffe for a two-hour summit in Caracas underscored her authority to pivot the entire state apparatus toward a new energy partnership with the West.

The post-Khamenei landscape in Iran lacks any such singular, empowered interlocutor. The Islamic Republic’s parallel power structure, coupled with a 47-year ideology of resistance, has for decades created an enduring dilemma: Those who want to make amends with America cannot deliver, while those who may be able to deliver do not want to make amends. No one currently in Tehran has the will or the weight to break from the inherited stance of resistance and broker a deal à la Delcy Rodríguez.

Given the pace of Israeli political assassinations inside Iran, the architecture of power in the Islamic Republic is constantly changing. Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the assassinated supreme leader, is now reportedly the top contender to replace his father. Within the regime’s hard-line circles—men who command little popular support but control every organ of repression—his stock has risen in the wake of the attacks that killed his father, mother, and wife. Although there are reports that he may have been wounded, Mojtaba is reportedly keen to take the reins of power. Backed by two particularly ruthless strongmen of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Taeb and Ahmad Vahidi, he would resume his father’s ruinous legacy.

In the meantime, sources inside Tehran suggest that the country is essentially being administered by two individuals: Ali Larijani and Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf. Larijani is managing political affairs and Qalibaf, a former IRGC commander, is managing military affairs. During normal times, these two men have a rivalrous relationship—both are former presidential candidates who aspire to lead the country—but during war, they have banded together.

Larijani sees himself as a pragmatic revolutionary insider in the style of China’s Deng Xiaoping. But his record thus far—he was reportedly one of the architects of Iran’s January crackdown, which according to some accounts killed 30,000 people—appears long on massacring and short on modernizing.

Qalibaf, a trained pilot with a public record of corruption, has long sought to portray himself as a modern strongman—the technocratic face of the IRGC. Despite these modern pretensions, he has closely aligned himself with Mojtaba Khamenei, a bet on the past rather than on the future.

These two pretenders reflect an insider debate whose subject is not the existence of the Islamic Republic but the best method of its survival. Both are committed to preserving the regime, including by means of domestic brutality. Their disagreement is over the strategic posture of resistance that has defined the past 47 years: One camp favors internal brutality coupled with external resistance; the other favors internal brutality coupled with external détente. Trump has never been troubled by how a regime treats its own people—only by whether it treats him with deference. Tehran’s embattled new leaders must decide whether a pact with him will save the revolution’s life or destroy its soul.

Trump has treated the opening week of the war as an improvisational jazz session, riffing on different analyses, strategies, and endgames in conversations with numerous reporters. This is not deliberate strategic ambiguity to throw an adversary off base, but rather a symptom of genuine confusion. I have spoken with current and former U.S. officials privy to the decision making (none was authorized to speak to the public), who describe a total lack of planning and contradictory aims among those worried about the war effort and those more concerned about the war’s domestic political implications.

Tehran has recognized for decades that American public opinion is one of its most potent allies in restraining the regional ambitions of U.S. presidents. This lesson first came clear in 1983, when the Iranian-directed bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut eventually compelled President Reagan to withdraw American forces from Lebanon. Today, the regime is reaching for the same playbook. By wreaking havoc on its Gulf neighbors and threatening the transit of 20 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran aims to spike global energy prices and soil the domestic political climate in the United States. The goal is to weaken Trump’s resolve by making him choose between a protracted war and the pocketbooks of his voters. Tehran’s hope is that he will abruptly declare a hollow victory and abort the mission.

Amid this brutal game of power politics is the spark that ostensibly lit the fuse: Trump’s warning to the Iranian authorities to stop the killing of protesters. Less than one week into this war, the hope that it would spawn an Iranian spring is already withering. At the moment, Iranian citizens are not participants but observers of this war, trying to steer clear for safety.

Populations living under tyranny understandably yearn for a “magic bullet”—a surgical strike that would destroy the oppressor while sparing the innocent. But like all wars, “Operation Epic Fury” has been far less precise than this fantasy. Only hours into the conflict, an errant strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in southern Iran served as a gut-wrenching reminder of the cost of such illusions, and a testament to the grim truth that those who pay most dearly for the fog of war are almost always the innocent.

As of right now, this is a war that virtually all sides are losing.

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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.