Iran Threatens Expanded Conflict Abroad

The supposed cease fire between the USA and Iran has ended and the price of oil has moved higher over night to the highest level in over a month.  Meanwhile, a new poll shows the Felon's approval has fallen to an all time low:

[The Felon's] Trump's approval rating fell to the lowest level of his presidency, ‌with an overwhelming majority of Americans concerned the U.S. war with Iran will last a long time, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Monday. Just 33% of respondents in the four-day survey said they approved of Trump's performance in the White House, while 64% disapproved. Trump's approval rating, down from 35% in a poll that closed earlier this month . . . 

In this setting, Iran is threatening to expand the war and the Felon, in another insane move, has threatened to bomb Oman, an America ally. As noted numerous times, there is no face-saving exit for the Felon from a debacle of his own making even as the mid-term elections bear down on a panicked Republican Party. It would seem the Iranians fully recognize that the war has become toxic in the minds of most voters and that perhaps the best way to drive the Felon either back to the negotiating table or into simply walking away.  They recognize that either an expanded war or one involving US ground troops will only drive the Felon's approval level even lower as other Republicans fear a blood bath in November.   A piece in the New York Times looks at Iran's calculations:

After almost six months in hiding, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has offered the clearest window yet into his vision for ruling the country, appointing a string of hard-line, veteran military commanders to top security roles.

The overhaul, which took place this month, signals that he plans to keep the nation on a war footing, analysts say — ready for open-ended confrontation with the United States and for keeping a lid on dissent at home among Iranians suffering the economic brunt of the conflict.

The appointments also reflect a leadership that is still struggling to devise a sustainable strategy for deterring Washington, analysts noted, as Tehran seeks a way to end the war without giving up the strategic leverage it has gained, most notably through control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The new security leaders will first have to navigate a period of limbo in the conflict. . . . The overhaul also included a new general staff of the armed forces, a new head of the Revolutionary Guards and a commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ naval forces — a critical role as the Strait of Hormuz has become so important.

Moderates in the government, like President Masoud Pezeshkian, say Iran should take advantage of its effective control over the Strait of Hormuz and reach a deal.

Hard-liners, however, want to hold out for more concessions and prefer maintaining an aggressive stance that would discourage the United States from launching new military interventions. They note that the last two wars launched by the United States and Israel, in June 2025 and in February this year, began while they were in negotiations with the Trump administration. They also point to the 2015 nuclear deal that Iran agreed with Washington, which President Trump withdrew from in 2018. . . . “The hard-liners gained immense traction, arguing — and history seems to have backed them — that the West is fundamentally untrustworthy.”

Ayatollah Khamenei, observers say, has surrounded himself with figures who seem as ready to negotiate, if they deem conditions right, as they are willing to prolong the war when they do not. That is a break with the approach of his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. . . . . Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has shown a greater willingness to initiate conflict with Washington, some analysts say, pointing to Iran’s decision to start the last round of military skirmishes.

“Iran is willing to engage in negotiations to end the war,” he added, “but is also prepared for a long conflict rather than accept an incomplete or temporary settlement that leaves it vulnerable to renewed U.S. pressure or attack.”

The Iranian leadership is apparently gambling that it can do that because Tehran can withstand the economic pain longer than [the Felon] President Trump can endure the fallout of the war in the United States.

This strategy has serious implications for Iran’s roughly 90 million people, who are struggling with an economy in free-fall and trapped by the constant risk of a return to all-out war.

Ayatollah Khamenei called on Mr. Taeb to strengthen the Basij’s “public intelligence network” when he announced his appointment last week, a move that experts say indicates that the group will have an expanded role in domestic surveillance and repression.

“Mojtaba may be willing to take risks in confronting the United States that even his father avoided in his final years,” Mr. Memarian said. “The question is whether Iran’s political system — and, more important, Iranian society — can absorb the consequences of that gamble.”

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Trump Punishes South Korea For His Iran Humiliation

The Felon continues to demonstrate on a daily basis his unfitness for office and daily erodes the United States' standing in the world and by the time his misrule ends the nation and the world will be far more unsafe.  Meanwhile, at home medical research has been canceled, health initiatives ended, and environmental protections and safe water and clean air are threatened, in the case of the latter to benefit the fossil fuels lobby.  On the international front, the Felon has no face-saving way to exit from the Iran war that he chose to launch despite warnings that he would face the exact situation that now confronts both the US and the global economy.  And with the Felon, one thing that is certain is that he will never take responsibility for his own actions and foolish decisions.  Someone else is always to blame, be they American citizens accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool rather than admit the Felon's crony who did the work was incompetent to blaming allies for the Felon's own Iran debacle. His ego and narcissism will never let him accept responsibility. The latest target in the Felon's blame someone else effort is South Korea which wisely opted to decline the Felon's after the fact request that South Korea somehow bail the Felon's ass out in Iran. A piece at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's destructive actions:

Last winter, Donald Trump plunged recklessly into war with Iran. The United States is now losing that conflict. Iran remains defiant, much of the world economy is more threatened now than it was six months ago, U.S. military resources are overextended, and munition stores are dangerously depleted. Trump and the United States have suffered one embarrassment after another; last week, he had to sneak away from the region on a backup plane because of a possible assassination threat from Tehran.

And so the [Felon] president of the United States has taken the logical next step: He is punishing South Korea, a loyal American friend, and tempting U.S. enemies to doubt America’s will to defend its allies.

Early Sunday evening, Trump instructed the Defense Department to “substantially reduce” its participation in an annual joint military exercise with the South Koreans. He did this, he said in a post on Truth Social, in part because such activities are expensive, but worse, they are insulting to his friends in North Korea, a country that has been “unthreatening and respectful” while he’s been in office.

More to the point, he complained that the South Koreans have not helped him defeat Iran: While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”

When Trump makes the effort to say something is “unrelated” to his actions (and then adds a coy question mark) it usually means it is completely related—and probably his central motivation.

Scaling back the exercise is, of course, an insane decision, which does nothing but hurt an ally, and tempt an adversary to think—correctly—that American leadership is feckless. You could be forgiven for wondering why South Korea and the rest of the free world must pay for Donald Trump’s failures. Such confusion is understandable, except that in Trump’s world, every loss, every defeat, is a personal insult. When things go wrong, someone must be held responsible—and that someone is never Donald Trump.

America and the rest of the world are now witnessing a public exhibition of narcissistic rage. Trump embarked on a war for personal glory, and what he got instead was ongoing humiliation. He clearly finds it all unbearable.

Trump both fears and respects the autocrats who rule Russia, China, and North Korea, and so he dares not cross them. Instead, he is seeking to assuage the psychic injury of his loss in Iran—including the American public learning of the shameful conditions to which he has subjected U.S. forces—by kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back.

The Iran war was not the president’s failure, you see. Others failed the president. . . . . because Trump is unable to subdue Iran, unable to replenish stocks of U.S. weapons he should never have expended in this war, unable to take care of the service personnel he has put in harm’s way, someone is going to pay. The most convenient target he could find, at least for the moment, was South Korea.

At a better moment in American history, an enraged Congress would step in and demand answers about such dangerous idiocy. They would rush to the White House, talk to the press, hold hearings, and in general act like responsible stewards of American power. Those days, at least among legislators of the president’s party, are long past.

Our allies might for the time being similarly ignore Trump’s tantrums, but they have power and agency of their own, and even now are likely planning for a world in which the Americans are no longer men and women of principle who stand by their word and by their friends.

The Chinese and the Russians and the North Koreas are certain to draw the appropriate lessons from this deranged policy. They have been shown, yet again, that when Trump fails, he hurts those he feels safe hurting. Already, North Korea is dispatching missiles and thousands of soldiers to aid Russia in its war on Ukraine. If a conflict should break out in the Pacific or on the Korean peninsula, or if the war in Europe spreads further West, the world’s dictators might well count on Trump to focus American wrath not on the enemies of the free world, but on the nations that have always pledged to stand side by side with the United States in a mutual defense of freedom.

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The Problem Causing Trump’s Supporters to Turn on Him

As the 2026 mid-term elections approach, the Felon has a huge problem - actually several Problems - that are causing even some his Kool-Aid drinking cultists to turn against him, namely high gasoline prices here at home in America.  The polls are showing the Felon far under water with historic levels of disapproval.  Even Fox News is unable to ignore the horrific poll numbers which are turning the Felon into an albatross around the necks of congressional Republican candidates. The New Republic reports on this reality: 

An intriguing pattern is developing in Fox’s polling of the Senate races this summer: Just about all the Democratic candidates are significantly outrunning the favorability of their party. While the party’s standing—which is pretty bad—can’t be shrugged off, Fox’s polls do show that most of these Democrats are not getting dragged down by association with the party.

Meanwhile, all these polls show [the Felon] Trump deeply underwater—including in states he won by double digits. To wit: Fox’s latest poll in Ohio finds Democrat Sherrod Brown leading GOP Senator Jon Husted by eight points, 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s despite the fact that only 42 percent view the Democratic Party favorably. The rub is that only 44 percent see Brown as too close to the Democratic “establishment,” while 55 percent do not. Turns out a lot of voters who don’t like the party support Brown.

Surrounded by bootlickers and sycophants, the Felon is likely being shielded from information he does not want to hear.  Indeed, this week the Felon more or less told Americans to stop whining about gas prices and to simply pay more for gas, ignoring, of course, the fact that the higher prices are directly due to the Felon's war of choice with Iran.  A second New Republic piece looks specifically at the gas price revolt:

[The Felon] President Trump has hit the highest national disapproval rating on gas prices in recorded history, as 79 percent of Americans—and a whopping 52 percent of Republicans—feel negatively about how he’s handled skyrocketing gas prices. 

“No president has been hated more when it comes to gas prices,” CNN’s Harry Enten said during a Friday segment. “79 percent ... that is the highest disapproval rating for any president on record.”  Former Presidents George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who each had their own struggles with gas prices, never eclipsed a 75 percent disapproval rating on the issue. 

“Donald Trump takes the cake as these $4-plus gas prices continue to give us pain at the pump. The American people are taking their anger out on the President of the United States,” Enten said.

The poll’s party line breakdown is even more devastating, as 52 percent of Republicans disapproving may put Trump-backed candidates at risk in their November elections as they have to answer for his decisions—especially in swing states. 96 percent of Democrats disapproved, along with 85 percent of independents. 

These are startling numbers that [the Felon] Trump can’t convincingly blame on decisions Biden made three years ago. Gas prices are high—and will continue to be high—because Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing Iran and Lebanon, and Iran closed the crucial Strait of Hormuz in response. That’s why your gas is $4 for the third time this year—something else that has never happened before.

Another factor that could harm Republican candidates, especially in tight races like the one for Virginia's 2nd congressional district is the Felon's complete lack of concern for America's service members as underscored by his statements about conditions on the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln.  Norfolk is home to the world's largest naval base and there are many service members and their families across the Hampton Roads region. In close races, service members and their loved ones could decide that the Felon and his party are no friends to them. The above New Republic piece looks at the Felon's uncaring statements:

[The Felon] President Donald Trump denied reports Friday of horrific conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—and suggested that the U.S. servicemembers should stay at sea for even longer.  

Trump offered a shockingly callous response while taking a question about the aircraft carrier that’s been deployed since November. 

Asked whether he believed that the servicemembers had been deployed for “too long,” Trump had a similarly heartless reply. “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough,” Trump said. . . . Clearly, the president couldn’t care less about U.S. servicemembers or their families. 

One can only hope this callousness will cost candidates like Jen Kiggans who puts the Felon above her constituents.

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Republicans Are Trying to Hide Their Health Care Cuts

The United States is the only advanced industrial nation without some form of universal health care coverage/access, instead leaving American citizens to either get coverage through their jobs - typically at high cost - or at the mercy of the rapacious for profit health insurance like United Health Care. The Affordable Care Act ("ACA") sought to improve access to coverage, but the Felon and his bootlicking congressional Republicans are making cuts to support for the ACA and throwing millions off of Medicaid. Compared to European nations where life expectancy is still rising, in the Felon/GOP's America, life expectancies are falling, particularly in red states (the difference in life expectancy in say Massachusetts versus West Virginia is nothing short of shocking). Only in America are average citizens treated as disposable garbage while the ultra-rich are showered with massive tax-cuts.  With the mid-term elections approaching, voters need to realize the cuts are about to get worse, cynically timed to take effect after the mid-term elections.  Obviously, the GOP views much of its base as too stupid to realize they are getting screwed over yet again so that the very wealthy can live ever more opulent lifestyles. A main editorial in the New York Times shouts out about the Felon/GOP's insidious cuts.  Here are highlights:

One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.

[The Felon] President Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.

The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, [the Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.

Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.

Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. The president and Congress are trying to ruin that success story.

Republicans’ attacks on affordable health care have taken two forms: one more passive, the other more direct.

In the passive approach, [The Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans allowed the expiration of enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats created the marketplaces for people who fell through the cracks. These people did not receive coverage through their jobs, and they were not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

In 2021, President Joe Biden and Congress increased the size of the subsidies, but they set them to expire in 2025, which mitigated their impact on the federal debt. . . . The federal debt is a genuine problem, having soared in the 21st century relative to the size of the American economy. But taking away people’s health insurance is not the answer. Repealing [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s foolhardy tax cuts, which benefit mostly the wealthy, would have a bigger fiscal effect than his health insurance cuts.

Those health insurance cuts led premiums and deductibles to spike this year. As an example, a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could see their premiums more than double, costing an additional $3,500 a year.

In the more direct approach to cutting health care coverage, Republicans targeted Medicaid, the program focused on the poor and disabled. Last year, the federal government enacted what Republicans call a work requirement. In reality, it is a paperwork requirement — one that forces Medicaid enrollees, most of whom are working or have a valid reason for not working, to file repeated documents proving they have a job or a valid exemption.  . . . About two in three enrollees who will lose health insurance should, in fact, be eligible for it, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated.

Arkansas enacted a version of this policy before the federal law passed, and it was a failure: Work force participation did not rise, and eligible people lost their insurance because of paperwork problems.

The Affordable Care Act was a triumph of government, and it is justifiably popular. Mr. Trump and other Republicans once promised to repeal the law, but they have largely stopped making such statements. Instead, they have sought to weaken the law — partly out of an ideological aversion to government, partly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy — and hope that voters do not notice.

Democrats should not let the president get away with this subterfuge. They should make the health insurance cuts a central piece of their midterm campaign and, as important, offer voters a vision that includes other improvements to the nation’s costly, rickety health care system, both to continue expanding access and to reduce costs. The Affordable Care Act also happens to be a model on costs; it meaningfully slowed growth in health care prices over the past decade.

Congress should be looking for next steps, not moving backward. The Affordable Care Act demonstrated that progress is possible.

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Trump Wants to Cut Taxes for the Rich. Again.

The federal deficit has hit an all time high, with a disproportionate amount of the debt piled on under the Felon's two regimes. So what does the Felon and his billionaire sycophants want to do? Give even more tax breaks to the wealthy, of course, further pursuing the Republican Party's effort to create a new Gilded Age, with even more tax burden shifted to the less than wealthy. It's all part of the GOP's long established reverse Robin Hood agenda. Should more tax cuts for the wealthy be enacted,  the deficit will balloon even more, likely driving up interest rates and making things more expensive, not more affordable. Decades of evidence shows that tax cuts for the wealthy never pay for themselves and that "trickle down economics" has been a fraud since the Reagan era. But in the up is down and down is up alternate reality of the GOP and far right, why worry about facts and objective reality.  Meanwhile, the super wealthy, who put lower taxes above all else, are spending millions on the mid-terms to elect pro-tax cutting Republicans to Congress.  Concerns about bankrupting America are nowhere on the radar screen.  A piece at The New Republic looks at this latest round of irresponsible tax cut for the wealthy proposals.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s election time, so the White House, according to Bloomberg’s Katy O’Donnell and Caitlin Reilly, is weighing whether to give the rich more tax breaks. Republicans! They just can’t help themselves!

Cutting taxes on the rich is a uniquely unpopular idea. Since 1939, Gallup has been asking, “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich”? In 1939, 54 percent said “should not” and only 35 percent said “should,” even though the Great Depression was raging and the New Deal was well along. Since 1939, though, the should nots have been falling and the shoulds have been rising. Today, a 52 percent majority say the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich heavily, and a 47 percent minority say it should not.

If you put the question in a manner more appetizing to moderates—do the rich pay their fair share?—61 percent say no, according to an April Pew Research Center poll. Fully 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners also say no, along with a not-inconsiderable 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Given these realities, the White House, if it endorses a tax cut, will try to sell it as a middle-class tax cut. The Democrats have tax-cut proposals of their own that target lower-income people. I’ve explained previously that I prefer the alternative approach of cutting payroll taxes at the low end and eliminating the Social Security tax ceiling at the high end

On Tuesday, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow, who held that post during Trump’s first term, discussed on Fox Business the two tax proposals Trump is contemplating. One is to index the capital gains tax, and the other is to exempt from capital gains tax home sales below $2 million. (Currently the exemption goes up to $500,000.) The first of these is a more obvious giveaway to the rich. The second mimics the Obama administration’s strategy of shielding the haute bourgeoisie when it hikes taxes on the rich. . . . . In Trump’s version, the context for cutting taxes for the haute bourgeoisie is a tax cut for richer folks, too.

The dialog between Kudlow and Hassett conveyed that particular air of unreality characteristic of Fox World. (It was on Kudlow’s Fox Business show, which is called Kudlow.) Kudlow began by noting that the Congressional Budget Office had just projected this year’s budget deficit to be $2.1 trillion, up from February’s estimate of $1.9 trillion. “The budget deficit for the first ten months of the year is $1.8 trillion,” Kudlow said. “I’m not sure I understand why.”

Kudlow was baffled because he actually believes, contrary to 45 years’ evidence, the GOP’s propaganda that tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. The tax cuts in last year’s budget reconciliation bill, for instance, slashed federal revenue by an estimated $570 billion.

In Fox World, as opposed to the real world, it is not thought illogical to follow a lamentation about government insolvency with a plea for tax cuts. Kudlow cited a McLaughlin & Associates poll that said 62 percent of voters approved of indexing the capital gains tax to inflation. . . . . Why not index capital gains taxes, too?

Because capital gains are already taxed at a lower rate than labor income. The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. The top labor-income rate (which is also too low) is 37 percent. Get back to me when you’ve eliminated that differential—and when you’ve also eliminated the “angel of death” loophole that lets assets escape capital gains tax when passed on to heirs—and we can talk. But if we ever do index capital gains like we do income-tax brackets, we’ll have to figure out some way to capture lost revenue—because remember that $2.1 trillion deficit? You don’t want to make it $3 trillion. According to the Yale Budget Lab, indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.

Then there’s the distributional impact. People making less than about $100,000 would receive virtually no benefit, according to the Yale model (and would likely pay more income tax to cover the lost revenue). People making more than about $3 million, on the other hand, would save $350,000 in taxes. If McLaughlin & Associates had bothered to furnish voters with that information, its poll results would have been quite different.

If Trump endorses these tax proposals, he’ll say they’re an affordability play and argue that lowering capital gains tax will encourage more people to sell their houses, thereby lowering prices. But Democrats should answer that these are just two more Trump giveaways to the wealthy, most especially the indexing of capital gains. There are many ways to reduce the cost of housing: zoning for higher density where appropriate; investing in infrastructure; eliminating tariffs on lumber, steel, and aluminum to lower construction costs; subsidizing low-income housing; and so on. Throwing money at millionaires and billionaires is the most regressive way conceivable to lower housing costs, and there’s no great reason to believe it would even work.

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Trump Is Trapped in His War in Iran

The price of oil remains elevated, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Iranian allies in Yemen have fired on Saudi ships in the Red Sea, and the Felon's only words to the American public is "it will work out" as Iran signals that it has the Felon right where they want him.  The Felon won reelection promising to lower prices "on day one" and to not involve the USA in more foreign wars.  Of course, he has done the exact opposite pushing prices higher through tariffs and now higher gas prices and higher fertilizer prices among other things, thanks to the Iran war that the Felon started by choice. One can debate why many voters were stupid enough to believe these lies from the lips of a man who lied over 30,000 times during his first regime, but that doesn't help to save America from the Felon's self-created mess in the Middle East. A piece in the New Republic looks at the situation - a similar article is in The Atlantic - looks at how there is no end to the war in sight and no relief from the associated increase in prices (gasoline hit an all time high for August) any time soon.  Here are higlights from the New Republic:

[The Felon] Donald Trump is not worried about Iran—at least, that’s the message he’s trying to send to panicked investors, frustrated voters, and vulnerable congressional Republicans. “We are low-keying it” on Iran, the president told Axios’s Barak Ravid on Sunday. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” he said, noting the country was “in very bad shape” economically. “It will work out.  It always works out,” he concluded. “It’s like a chess game.”

“It always works out” is never a reassuring message to receive during a crisis, especially when it comes from someone who has declared multiple bankruptcies and launched a failed coup.

Trump, of course, was elected president for the first time after those bankruptcies and won again after the failed coup (and the dozens of criminal charges that followed it). But just because he got lucky twice doesn’t mean he will again. And if the war with Iran is a “chess game,” then it’s one he and the United States are losing badly, with few available moves left on the board.

Iran announced on Monday that it would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane that carries around a fifth of the world’s oil supply, until the U.S. agrees to its demands, which include the lifting of sanctions, the payment of reparations and the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and ending the blockade that Trump believes will ultimately lead to victory.

Now, Iran—not Trump—is playing hardball. And there’s little reason to believe that even the economic chokehold Iran is currently facing will cause its leaders to bend anytime soon, especially since they’re well aware of the damage that the war—in particular its steroidal impact on the price of gas, fertilizer, and other essential goods—is doing to the GOP’s bid to retain control of Congress in the November midterms.

Ever since the war began, Iranian leaders have insisted that they are prepared to withstand crippling economic sanctions and devastating airstrikes, in large part because they believe that Trump and congressional Republicans are far less willing to face the rising prices that have accompanied the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. So far, it’s hard to argue with that read.

Trump is historically unpopular on the economy; his net approval on inflation is 50 points underwater. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are facing an electoral bloodbath that could equal the 2006 wipeout. Iranian leaders, meanwhile, seem more than willing to withstand a blockade until the midterms and to use those elections to their benefit. The only question now is if Trump folds before the midterms or if he allows the war to continue indefinitely—an eventuality that would almost certainly hand the White House to Democrats in 2028.

The war in Iran is already, strategically speaking, one of the biggest foreign-policy blunders in American history. Iran will likely emerge from the conflict, whenever it ends, stronger than before. The U.S., meanwhile, has lost much of what was left of its global credibility, along with the majority of its supply of munitions. But the war is also the capstone of one of the biggest political blunders in American history. Less than two years ago, voters elected Trump because they were frustrated about the state of the economy. Since retaking office, he has done seemingly everything he can to make that economy even worse—and make an ever-increasing number of those voters hate him.

The frenetic nature of Trump’s presidency makes it hard, if not impossible, to tell one overarching story about it. Every week, it seems, features at least three middle-of-the-night tweetstorms, two historic corruption scandals, and one other news-generating disgrace that eats up several days of media coverage.

In just a year and a half, his administration has launched a global trade war, decimated much of the U.S. government, kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation and launched a war against another, all while deploying masked paramilitary goons to snatch people off of the street in our communities and trying (usually without success) to prosecute its critics. In this time, Trump has also survived two historic scandals, one relating to his long-time friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the other involving ongoing self-dealing and corruption that has netted him and his family billions—and that would make a politician in the Gilded Age blush. There’s a lot going on, in other words.

But the biggest story of Trump’s second term is arguably its simplest. Voters returned Trump to power because prices were high, even though the incumbent administration was not really at fault. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation was rampant everywhere in the world.

That didn’t matter. Voters were pissed off about paying too much—so pissed off, in fact, that they reelected the person who had failed to responsibly manage the pandemic and then tried to cling to power after he lost in 2020, notably by ginning up a mob that intended to hang his vice president.

Trump got lucky. A normal administration would have recognized as much on some level. At the very least, it would have made the most important issue of the recent presidential election a focal point: do everything possible to bring prices down and take other steps to alleviate the affordability crisis. Trump didn’t. He and his advisers decided a narrow, fluky election was a historic mandate that gave them clearance to do whatever they wanted. Many of those moves—the massive cuts driven by Elon Musk’s DOGE project, Trump’s global trade war, the war in Iran—sabotaged the economic recovery that had begun under Joe Biden. They did nothing to address the things that people hated about the economy under Biden—and in fact, they all made those things worse to varying degrees.

And so here we are. Even Trump’s voters are fed up. . . . . . Trump’s overall economic numbers are historically bad and have fallen 31 points since he returned to office.

Congressional Republicans, particularly those in vulnerable seats, are campaigning in the constant shadow of these political storm clouds. But Iran’s leaders can see them too, and that’s why they’re playing hardball over the Strait of Hormuz. All Trump can offer, meanwhile, is hollow reassurance that “it always works out.” That adage may be true for him, but it rarely works out for the people caught in his blast radius.

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The Ghost of “60 Minutes” Will Haunt Bari Weiss

The Felon, like would be dictators before him, has long wanted to censor members of the the press and media outlets that report the news objectively and expose the excesses, corruption, and incompetence of his regime or the ugly aspects of the Felon in general. Part of this stems from the Felon's intense narcissism, but it also stems from his desire to create a false reality for his Kool-Aid drinking cultists. Fox News has long been a propaganda arm for the Felon, but other outlets have not willingly surrendered their integrity and become mere arms of the Felon's corrupt regime. Sadly, many in the billionaire class who seek to curry favor with the Felon and approval of business mergers have no hesitation about destroying reputable news outlets. Jeff Bezos has turned the Washington Post into a mere shadow and seen of what it once was and seen the paper lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers (I canceled my subscription) and David Ellison is endeavoring to do the same to CBS, including destroying the independence and  journalism of  programs like "Sixty Minutes" which Ellison's henchwoman Bari Weiss is savaging (we no longer watch CBS).  Hopefully, the stellar journalists being fired and/or muzzled will find homes at other outlets and continue to expose the bad and the ugly about the Felon and his every more corrupt regime and those who aid and abet it.  A piece at Salon looks at this sad situation:

For 58 seasons, through wars, impeachments and the corporate dismantling of the network news business around it, “60 Minutes” remained America’s highest-rated newsmagazine. Viewership of the CBS News program was up 9% during the 2025-2026 season and generated more than 2.5 billion social-media video views, according to the network. Yet in a bizarre case of fixing something that does not need fixing, the program became the one CBS property executives chose to radically remake. 

David Ellison, the network’s new owner, appears determined to test whether the rare commercial-news institution that persuaded millions of Americans to spend an hour with investigative reporting can survive the removal of the very people who made it matter. In barely a year, under the ownership of Ellison’s Skydance and the editorial stewardship of Bari Weiss, that legacy has been stripped down, gutted and reassembled as an instrument of political appeasement. By sacrificing seasoned investigative reporters and filling the vacuum with anti-woke contrarians, Ellison and Weiss have defanged a national treasure. 

[T]he program retained an essential public purpose. And in its zeal to purge the newsroom of dissent, CBS and Weiss may have inadvertently triggered the creation of their most dangerous future competitor — and accidentally set the stage for its own undoing.

The journalists Weiss pushed out did not simply disappear. Bill Owens, the former “60 Minutes” executive producer who resigned in 2025 over corporate interference before Weiss even arrived, has reportedly been assembling a business plan and pitch deck for a rival investigative newsmagazine, seeking something in the neighborhood of $50 million to fund two years of programming. The names attached to it read like a “60 Minutes” reunion special. Such a group — joined potentially by Anderson Cooper and the former producers who resigned in protest — could sell itself as carrying the true DNA of gold-standard television news. 

There is a reason Ellison spent billions acquiring a legendary news brand. His $8 billion purchase of Paramount and his aggressive right-wing revamp of CBS News is an overt attempt to smooth the waters for an infinitely larger prize — a $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes cable news giant CNN. With Donald Trump long signaling his disdain for traditional media, Ellison’s moves at CBS functioned as a high-stakes litmus test. When the Department of Justice cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger in June, Ellison passed.

But after 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America filed anti-trust lawsuits to block the merger ahead of a trial next March, Ellison took to the opinion pages of The New York Times on Tuesday to defend his growing empire. Pushing back against speculation regarding his political loyalties, Ellison pledged “independence” for his newsrooms and argued that the combined entity would control only a fraction of the streaming market. But his pleas for personal trust ring hollow. You do not demonstrate a commitment to objective journalism by spending $150 million to acquire The Free Press and handing the keys of a legacy news division to Weiss — an opinion columnist with zero television management experience and a well-documented history of tendentious reporting.

Now, at CBS News, her editorial interference has been disguised as routine management. At her infamous first staff meeting, Weiss vowed to “do the f**king news,” but what followed instead suggests a systematic effort to reshape reality.

When covering the conflict in Iran, Vega said she was instructed to open her segment by declaring the nation “totally outgunned by the United States and Israel” — framing that skewed favorably toward the Trump administration’s telling of events. (CBS News has disputed the broader claim that it sought to inject bias, saying its editorial process reflects ordinary review.) 

Elsewhere, Weiss personally blocked a deeply reported piece by Sharyn Alfonsi on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of individuals into conditions marked by horrific human rights abuses. Though the story eventually leaked in Canada and later aired on CBS in its original form, the message Weiss sent to the newsroom was unmistakable. The effect was to launder censorship in the language of journalistic standards.

Most recently, it was revealed that Alfonsi had been sitting on a major scoop regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s financial ties to Wall Street giants like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — complete with an on-camera interview filmed in March 2026 with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who was heading his own investigation into Epstein’s finances — before being fired by Weiss in May. CBS claimed the piece simply was not finished by the end of last season, and has not said whether it intends to air it this fall. Wyden is now pushing legislation to hold individual bankers personally accountable for exactly this kind of institutional silence.

The optics are damning regardless of the internal timeline: The network fired the reporter chasing one of the biggest financial accountability stories of the year in the middle of a purge explicitly aimed at correspondents who resisted political pressure, and the story broke three months later, just not on CBS.

This should be the central concern about the Ellison era at CBS. Not whether Ellison privately considers himself a conservative, a liberal or a man above ideology, nor whether Weiss thinks of herself as a dissident or a reformer. The question is whether their actions are creating the practical conditions under which reporters can hold power to account.

The upheaval has been extraordinary. Tanya Simon, the executive producer who oversaw the program’s recent success, was removed alongside correspondents Alfonsi and Vega, as well as senior editors and producers. Scott Pelley was fired shortly after publicly challenging the appointment of Nick Bilton as executive producer and accusing Weiss of “murdering” the broadcast. Cooper had already departed. The result is a “60 Minutes” with a drastically depleted bench heading into a new season.

In place of these decorated investigative journalists, Bilton and Weiss have assembled what the former reportedly referred to as “the Avengers of news.” But, as longtime media critic Eric Deggans pointed out, a look at the roster reveals a strategy straight out of the old Fox News playbook: Hire a token investigative journalist to construct a thin facade of balance while filling the remaining ranks with anti-woke contrarians. 

When an organization hires a conservative columnist known for asking whether liberal feminism ruined the workplace, or a producer whose major contributions include reframing starvation in Gaza through the lens of pre-existing health conditions, it signals a troubling shift in focus. 

Yet in their rush to destroy the old guard, Weiss and Ellison have overlooked the fact that they left behind an elite corps of unemployed, highly motivated investigative journalists with nothing left to lose. Whether this exiled team finds a home as the investigative video arm of an outlet like ProPublica, launches a streaming-native newsmagazine or partners with an independent distributor, the potential is staggering. Pelley and Alfonsi are now set to serve as journalists in residence at Columbia Journalism School during the 2026-27 academic year. While that is not a launch announcement, it is evidence that their careers and credibility did not disappear when CBS took away their airtime. 

Somewhere out there, a rival show called “Stop Watch” is writing itself, and CBS built the pitch deck for it, one firing at a time.

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