Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. On that long-ago day, Americans fought beside soldiers from many allied countries to save the world from fascism. Very few of those heroes are still alive today.
Joe Picard perched atop a precarious mound of 300-plus-pound high-explosive shells as his ship churned toward Normandy’s beaches. The teenager had been at sea only once before, to cross the Atlantic, and now he was sailing across the English Channel to pile into the breach that Allied forces had opened in Hitler’s defenses weeks earlier, on D-Day. Smoke from the fighting still rose on the horizon, but Picard’s eyes scanned the gray water below for signs of German U-boats. “You know,” he told the soldier next to him, “if we ever get hit with a torpedo here, they won’t ever find a trace of us.”
More than 80 years later, few men like Picard remain: those who participated in the boldest military operation of the 20th century and can lay claim to membership in the “greatest generation.” Less than 0.5 percent of the more than 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive. Before long, the great invasion of France that began on June 6, 1944—and the Second World War itself—will be recounted only in documentaries and books alongside other historic conflicts such as the First World War and the American Civil War. The immediacy of personal experience will vanish. But Picard, now 100 years old, can still recall the feel of the straw he stuffed into his mattress, the blast of a mine soon after he landed on Utah Beach, negotiations in French for the use of a château, and a friend’s death in a cold forest in Germany.
“A lot of people have said to me, God, how do you remember all that stuff?” Picard told me when we spoke at his retirement community in Rhode Island, near where he grew up. “I don’t remember what happened yesterday, but I remember what happened 80 years ago.” The memories have “always been vivid ever since the day they happened.”
Picard is still doing his part to maintain D-Day as living history. He has become, in his later years, the narrator of his own war experience. He speaks with classes of schoolchildren, constantly amazed that they care enough to listen. He has revisited and reminisced on the battlefields of Europe with the Best Defense Foundation, a nonprofit that returns veterans to the places where they served. His repetition of war stories across the years has also become a marker against which to measure how much he, and the country, has changed.
Back then, he and millions of others joined the military as volunteers or draftees. Most viewed fighting as a duty to be discharged before real adulthood began. The experience of war may have defined their lives but did not determine them. And the veterans were lauded for their service by grateful citizens, whether in France, in Germany, or at home.
Today’s service members are professionals, many of them dedicated to a career in uniform, separated to some degree from civilian life. The rancor and fissures in society run so deep that Picard finds it hard to imagine the national unity and resolve that would be required to risk millions of conscripts’ lives in pursuit of the liberation of others. “I hope that this type of situation won’t happen again,” Picard told me, with New England understatement, “because here in the U.S., I think our attitude is off a bit.”
The article is fascinating and well worth reading.
As an example of the current official attitude toward the D-Day anniversary, our so-called president chose to mark the day by posting an AI video of himself behaving like the childish idiot he is. I won’t share it here, but you can find it on Bluesky.
On the blood-soaked morning of June 6, 1944, the fate of World War II hinged not only on generals but also on thousands of ordinary people who fought their way onto the beaches and into the skies over Normandy, France, or otherwise joined in what became the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Over the years, the ranks of those who witnessed D-Day have thinned, and the event has receded from living memory into the realm of archives — and obituaries.
Here are the stories of some of those The New York Times has commemorated in recent years. They serve as a poignant reminder that the liberation of Europe required courage that transcended race, class and gender.
1921-2014
Walter Ehlers
Mr. Ehlers was the last survivor of 12 soldiers who were awarded the Medal of Honor — the highest American military decoration — for their actions during the Normandy campaign. (Nine of the medals were given posthumously.) On the 50th anniversary of the invasion, in 1994, he gave an address and walked along Omaha Beach with President Bill Clinton. Read his obituary.
1923-2023
Maureen Flavin Sweeney….
On her 21st birthday, June 3, 1944, Maureen Flavin, who worked in a post office recording weather data, unwittingly helped determine the outcome of World War II. Though she was unaware of it at the time, her weather reports were noticed by Allied military leaders. While working a late shift that day, she registered the likelihood of stormy weather on June 5, causing General Dwight D. Eisenhower to delay the invasion of Normandy by another day. Some say the effort would have failed if she hadn’t noticed the potential for disaster. Read her obituary.
1924-2025
Charles Norman Shay
“I saw there were many wounded men who were floundering in the water, who could not help themselves, and I knew that if nobody went to help them, they were doomed to die,” Mr. Shay recalled of his experience as a 19-year-old medic on Omaha Beach. One of about 175 Native Americans fighting for the Allied troops there, he repeatedly saved soldiers from drowning by turning them on their backs, dragging them ashore and tending to their wounds. Read his obituary.
1908-1998
Martha Gellhorn….
One of the first female war correspondents, Ms. Gellhorn hid on a hospital ship on D-Day and then sneaked ashore. She later accompanied British pilots on nighttime bombing raids over Germany. When the Allies liberated the concentration camp Dachau, she wrote of what she saw: “Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence, the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.” Read her obituary.
1922-2023
Léon Gautier….
Mr. Gautier was the last surviving member of France’s elite Kieffer Commando unit, which was among the first wave of Allied troops to storm the heavily defended beaches in the northern part of the country. As they sprinted up the beach, they cut through barbed wire under a hail of bullets. They spent 78 days on the front lines, and of the 177 who waded ashore, only two dozen escaped death or injury. Read his obituary.
Trump sent Pete Hegseth to France for the D-Day anniversary. His message to our allies was that they are letting too many immigrants into their countries.
PARIS, June 6 (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned on Saturday that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy.
His remarks echo criticisms often made by the administration of President Donald Trump about Europe, a region Washington argues is hampered by weak defences, inability to tackle immigration, needless red tape and “censorship” of far-right and nationalist voices to keep them from power.
“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive,” Hegseth said in a speech at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.
“When will European capitals do something about that invasion or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said.
Hegseth was speaking during commemorations for the 82nd anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, when U.S. and Allied forces crossed the English Channel to launch the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi occupation.
U.S. officials, including Trump — and Vice President JD Vance as recently as Friday — have often criticized European countries for failing to control immigration.
Other than Native Americans, everyone in the U.S., including our “founding fathers,” either came here as an immigrant or descended from immigrants. Trump married two immigrants. This anti-immigrant attitude is just plain sick.
This is a shocking story that demonstrates how the Trump administration’s anti-science policies are affecting U. S. scientific research.
Five diabetes researchers, including the editor of a leading journal, were removed from the field’s premier conference in New Orleans on Friday morning, after handing out copies of an editorial criticizing the TrumpNI administration’s “dismantling” of the biomedical research enterprise.
The incident occurred outside a conference hall where a keynote address had originally been scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, at a gathering organized by the American Diabetes Association. A group of about 10 researchers, including some of the field’s leaders, were quietly handing out printouts of an editorial published in Diabetes Care, a journal the association publishes, according to three of the participants. Security and police told them to leave at the direction of event organizers and confiscated some of their lanyards and ability to attend the conference.
One of those ejected from the meeting was Steven Kahn, a University of Washington professor of medicine who is the editor in chief of Diabetes Care and the director of a federally funded diabetes research center. Kahn said in an interview that he had 1,000 copies made of an editorial that he had co-authored that called scientists to action to oppose changes to federal biomedical research funding that endangered diabetes research.
“A number of people who come to this meeting are scientists, who feel their livelihoods are threatened by what NIH is doing to science,” Kahn said.
Bhattacharya had been scheduled to give the keynote address, but it was instead given by Richard Woychik, a senior adviser to the NIH director for the agency’s Make America Healthy Again strategy. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.
Kahn said he was set to present a poster, give a talk and chair a session at the ADA Scientific Sessions meeting, which runs from Friday until Monday — but has since been informed by the scientific society’s leaders that he has been relieved of those duties.
Irl Hirsch, a University of Washington endocrinologist who was among the group handing out the editorials but did not have his badge confiscated, said that the group was peaceful and that there were no signs or chants. Hirsch described the situation as “censorship” by the scientific society — of leaders in the diabetes field who were sharing an editorial that pointed out that the NIH’s stewardship of biomedical research was having a destructive effect on diabetes research.
“It’s going to take generations to fix where we are now,” Hirsch said.
NEW ORLEANS — Members of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) were escorted by police out of the convention center in New Orleans during the organization’s annual meeting on Friday as they handed out copies of an editorial criticizing Trump administration changes to U.S. biomedical research.
Among them was Steven Kahn, MBChB, the lead author of the editorial, which published online in late April in the organization’s flagship journal, Diabetes Care. Kahn is also the editor in chief of the journal.
Kahn, Aaron Kelly, PhD, past ADA president Desmond Schatz, MD, Justin Ryder, PhD, Irl Hirsch, MD, and at least one other member were handing out printed copies of the editorial outside of a keynote speech given by an NIH official. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, was supposed to give the talk, but pulled out at the last minute, Kahn told MedPage Today.
Kahn said ADA leadership had inserted a statement in the editorial that the organization “had nothing to do with the writing of this manuscript. That is their insert.”
ADA’s media team confirmed that five registrants were removed for violating code of conduct rules that they agreed to when registering for the meeting.
“These attendees were escorted out by our onsite event security because they demonstrated behavior not consistent with this code of conduct,” the media team said in a statement. “They were respectfully given the opportunity to cease this behavior and chose not to which is why they were escorted out.”
I don’t even know how to react to this–professional organization so fearful of Trump that it won’t stand up for its more prestigious scientists. We may never recover from the cowardly actions of organization that are bending to the will of an ignorant, bigoted “president.”
There’s some good news from California, where the primary votes are slowly but surely being counted.
Xavier Becerra, a Democrat who was practically an afterthought until the final weeks of the California governor campaign, will advance to the November election after a top-two finish in this week’s primary, The Associated Press determined on Friday.
Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host, and Tom Steyer, a Democrat and former hedge fund manager, remain locked in a close race for the second spot as election officials continue counting millions of ballots. In California’s nonpartisan primary, the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the November election.
Mr. Becerra’s primary performance caps his extraordinary come-from-behind surge in the tumultuous race and positions him to become California’s first Latino governor in the modern era if he wins in November. In interviews, voters said they appreciated his long career in government, which distinguished him from a sprawling field of less experienced competitors.
Mr. Hilton led in initial returns this week, but he was the beneficiary of Republican voters who turned in their ballots early. Many Democrats said they waited until the final week of voting because they found it difficult to choose among their party’s candidates and wanted to see how the race evolved up to Election Day.
The race was called on Friday when Mr. Becerra passed Mr. Hilton and moved into first place in returns. It remained to be seen whether Mr. Hilton could stave off Mr. Steyer, who has gained ground since Election Day but may remain stuck in third.
On what could happen next:
Mr. Becerra, 68, would be an overwhelming favorite if he were to face Mr. Hilton in the general election. No Republican has won a statewide office in California since 2006, and Mr. Hilton would be further hamstrung by his endorsement from President Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in California.
If Mr. Becerra were to face Mr. Steyer, he would endure a blistering intraparty fight over the next few months. Mr. Steyer, a billionaire who ran a hedge fund, spent $216 million of his personal fortune in the primary, and he has shown no indication that he would slow down in a general election. His spending helped make California’s primary the most expensive governor’s race in American history, according to an analysis by AdImpact, an ad tracking firm.
In the final stretch of the primary, Mr. Steyer attacked Mr. Becerra with negative ads. One suggested that Mr. Becerra could be indicted by the Trump administration because two of his aides pleaded guilty in the past year to corruption charges for siphoning off Mr. Becerra’s own campaign funds. Mr. Becerra has said he was unaware of the transfers, and federal prosecutors described him as the victim of his aides’ crimes.
Other attacks portrayed Mr. Becerra as beholden to special interests because the California Chamber of Commerce and other business interests put about $54 million into campaigns opposing Mr. Steyer and supporting Mr. Becerra.
I hope Steyer loses. He’s just another entitled billionaire.
In Maine, Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is facing a storm of controversy. I don’t know if you’ve been following the story, but Platner has been accused of troubling behavior with women, and his controversial Nazi tattoo is back in the news.
Democrats are at each other’s throats about Graham Platner after his latest scandal. They don’t know what to do about it.
The New York Times released a report Thursday with disturbing accounts from several of Platner’s ex-girlfriends, just days before he is set to win the Democratic nomination to face GOP Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, a critical Senate battleground. One woman described Platner grabbing her in ways that left marks and once locking her in a room. She also claimed he knew that his tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol when he got it — something he has repeatedly denied.
The report — on the heels of last week’s news that Platner had sexted other women while married — left Democrats torn. Some view Platner, whose campaign has persisted despite a series of scandals, as their only chance to take down Collins. He continuously led Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in primary polling before she suspended her campaign in April, and has led the Republican senator in public head-to-head polls.
“Several donors I know are still all-in for Platner because he’s not Susan Collins and he’s a Democrat,” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic strategist and donor adviser. “The line that keeps being thrown around is the double standard that exists between Republicans and Democrats, where if this was a Republican, they’d all be getting behind him.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who is scheduled to campaign with Platner on Friday, reiterated his support. And some Democrats online were quick to cast the ex-girlfriend of Platner who spoke on record to The Times, Lyndsey Fifield, as a partisan activist because she has worked in Republican politics.
Still, others warned that he’s a loose cannon and there’s no predicting what other information about his past will spill into public view. What has already come to light, they argued, might already be enough to sink his candidacy, not to mention undermine the party’s core values.
Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, moved to quell mounting Democratic anxieties about his candidacy on Friday, telling supporters in a defiant speech that his past behavior was being “weaponized” by his political opponents.
A day after The New York Times reported that three women — a conservative and two Democrats — who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner described volatile and “toxic” relationships, Mr. Platner addressed a crowd at a theater in Bar Harbor, expressing confidence that Maine voters would stick by him.
“When politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back,” Mr. Platner said. “The state of Maine raised me, and the state of Maine saved me, and to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”
Mr. Platner’s appearance came at a tense moment in one of the year’s premier Senate races. With just days left before Maine’s primary on Tuesday, revelations about Mr. Platner’s personal history have caused escalating discomfort within his party, while drawing intensifying attacks from Republicans.
The rally also took place less than a week after The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had sought to warn his campaign last year that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.
Onstage, Mr. Platner referred to Ms. Gertner by name, drawing chants of “Amy!” It was one of the strongest responses from a supportive but relatively sedate crowd that included attendees who said they were anxious about Mr. Platner’s candidacy and still getting to know the candidate.
Mr. Platner said from the stage that he had gone through a period of “darkness” after his military service.
“Now, as every single piece of that past and journey gets dug up, litigated and weaponized, you have my back,” he said.
When Platner first threw his hat in the ring last year, there was a reasonable argument for his candidacy — here was a political outsider with a fresh perspective who represented a new generation of political talent for Democrats.
But everything we have learned about Platner over the past several months suggests that he is a moral and political trainwreck, with enough skeletons in his closet to fill a graveyard.
Indeed, since Platner announced his candidacy last year, there has been an unceasing drumbeat of scandals about him. He filled a Reddit message board with sexist, racist and off-color comments. He has exaggerated his working-class background and appears to have spent most of his life living off handouts from his parents. But above all, there was the revelation last fall that he had gotten a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest two decades ago — and by his account only realized it was a Nazi tattoo in the fall of 2025, as he began his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In recent days, the stories about Platner have taken on a darker, more troubling hue. Last week, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times revealed that soon after his marriage in 2023, Platner was caught by his wife sexting as many as a dozen women. His profile page on Kik, an anonymous social media site often used for dating, was still active.
The news continues to be confusing and depressing.
We are supposedly in a war, and the enemy has shot down two of our planes and hit two helicopters. An airman has been missing in Iran for 2 days now. But the “president” is spending time posting insults to Bruce Springsteen and the New York Times on his social media site. So far, he has said nothing publicly about the missing serviceman.
What else is Trump focusing on during the war that he unilaterally started? Releasing a new budget demanding even more defense spending, cuts to domestic programs, and–incredibly–money to rebuild Alcatraz. Oh, and he’s sent his VP to campaign for reelection of the right-wing president of Hungary.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense is firing generals because he’s afraid of losing his job.
U.S. forces were searching for an F-15E crew member after a two-seater fighter jet went down over Iran, a U.S. official said Friday. The other crew member has been rescued.
Iran shot down the F-15E Strike Eagle, a U.S. official said, and the American military was scrambling to find the second aviator after a regional governor offered a bounty for its crew.
A U.S. aircraft that was mobilized to support the search and rescue mission was also struck by Iranian fire after the F-15E jet was downed, a U.S. official told NBC News.
That aircraft, a single-pilot A-10 Thunderbolt, known as a Warthog, made it to Kuwaiti airspace, where the pilot ejected and the aircraft crashed, the official said. The pilot is safe and the A-10 is down in Kuwait, according to the official.
Two U.S. military Blackhawk helicopters that were involved in search and rescue efforts were also struck by Iranian fire, but the service members were unharmed, according to a U.S. official.
Iran’s media published photos alongside claims from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that it had shot down the F-15E. The Pentagon and the White House did not immediately comment on the claims.
The governor of Iran’s Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province in Iran’s southwest, where Iranians were reported to have been searching for the missing pilot, on Saturday denied reports that the second American crew member had been found and arrested, according to Iran’s semiofficial Mehr news agency.
The regional leadership of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also denied that “the second pilot of an F-15E fighter jet has been captured and detained by special airborne forces,” Mehr also reported.
The missing airman, a weapon systems officer, was aboard a US F-15 fighter jet that was downed in southern Iran. A pilot who was also on board has been rescued, US media report.
Iranian officials are urging citizens to find them “alive” and are offering rewards for their capture, according to state media.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump says Iran has 48 hours to make a deal or reopen the Strait of Hormuz or “all Hell will reign down on them.”
Iran says the area around the Bushehr nuclear power plant has been attacked with one person killed – the global nuclear watchdog says no increase in radiation has been reported, but calls for “maximum military restraint” to avoid a nuclear accident.
It’s a risky US operation to rescue the missing crew member, even though they’ve all prepared for years for this kind of moment.
It is also fraught with political peril.
If Iran finds this airman, and he’s paraded on TV, it will be a propaganda victory for Iran, and a political humiliation – and worry – for the US.
And, it would provide Tehran with a prisoner of war – a bargaining chip at a time when efforts to end this war are already stuck, despite US President Donald Trump’s claims of great progress.
It’s a moment which could give real meaning to the name of this US military operation – Epic Fury.
Retaliation when it comes will be risky for Iran, the region, and a world already suffering economic shocks.
After five weeks of war, the US and Israel have inflicted serious damage on Iran’s military capabilities.
But the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has repeatedly declared they’ve achieved “total air dominance.”
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social early Saturday not to address the public on the fate of a U.S. service member at the center of desperate search efforts in Iran, but to complain about The New York Times.
At the heart of the 79-year-old president’s post, as usual, was himself.
Rachael, by Thomas John Carlson
“The Failing New York Times, whose lack of credibility, and their constant Fake News attacks on your favorite President, ME, has caused its circulation to absolutely PLUMMET, referred to our severely weakened and extremely unreliable ‘partner,’ NATO, as the North American Treaty Organization,” he wrote….
The newspaper’s communications team acknowledged the mistake that Trump had seized upon, saying the name of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had been “misstated.”
Trump’s post comes a day after Iran shot down an Air Force F-15E fighter jet over the country, marking a dangerous new turn in a war now into its fifth week.
Iran has since placed a bounty on the aircrew, and a dramatic search and rescue mission ensued, resulting in one crew member being rescued by American forces. The second remains missing, and both the White House and Pentagon have been silent on the status of rescue efforts.
Trump, asked Friday about the missing service member, told NBC News the situation wouldn’t affect negotiations to end the war, saying, “It’s war. We’re in war.”
It’s not news, but it’s always stunning when Trump demonstrates his complete inability to feel empathy.
As the war in Iran erupted five weeks ago, social media sleuths across Western and Chinese platforms flagged a wave of viral posts detailing equipment at U.S. bases, the movements of American carrier groups and granular breakdowns of how military aircraft were assembling for strikes on Tehran.
The intelligence came from a fast growing new market: Chinese firms — some with links to the People’s Liberation Army — marrying artificial intelligence with open-source data to market information they claim can “expose” the movements of U.S. forces.
Beijing has sought to distance itself from any direct involvement in the Iran war, but the firms — many of which have emerged in the past five years as part of the government’s push to harness private AI for military use — are capitalizing on the conflict.
U.S. officials and intelligence experts are divided over whether Chinese firms’ publicly marketed tools pose a genuine threat or are being credibly used by U.S. adversaries, but say the surge in private-sector offerings points to a growing security risk and reflects Beijing’s intent to project the strength of its intelligence capabilities.
Beijing has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting private firms developing AI with practical defense applications under its civil-military integration strategy, and last month announced plans to supercharge those efforts as part of a broader five-year national strategy….
Private firms have long used open-source data — including flight trackers, satellite imagery and shipping data — to generate market intelligence. But the growing AI capability of Chinese firms is making these tools more powerful, underscoring the growing challenge of concealing U.S. military movements from adversaries.
On Friday, the Trump administration submitted its annual budget request to Congress. The document called for dramatically reducing what the United States government does for Americans. The budget called for steep cuts to funding for education, housing and health, funneling resources toward the military as the war in Iran reaches its fifth week. This shift would leave the portion of the budget known as “nondefense discretionary,” or NDD funding, which accounts for most domestic activities aside from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and SNAP, at its lowest level since at least Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency.
These NDD programs have already suffered more than 15 years of disinvestment, including particularly sharp cuts over the last three years. In total, the president called to cut NDD funding (excluding Veterans Affairs medical care) by $83 billion below last year’s levels.
When Trump signed the “big, beautiful bill” last July, he enacted the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in history. The same law provided enormous tax cuts that disproportionately further enriched the very rich. Taken together, it instituted the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history. The new budget proposal would double down on his legacy of cutting programs that ordinary Americans, and especially those already struggling to make ends meet, rely on.
Fortunately, the proposed cuts are all but certain to be dead on arrival — not just because congressional Democrats will reject them, but because congressional Republicans can’t pass them. In 2023, House Republicans appropriators attempted to write funding bills with “only” $60 billion in cuts to nondefense programs. With Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate at the time, those bills were primarily a messaging exercise rather than a sincere attempt at legislation. And yet $60 billion proved too extreme even for the extreme House Republican conference, which pulled five of its 12 bills, abandoning the process altogether.
If House Republicans could not stomach $60 billion of cuts that had no chance of becoming law, they certainly can’t write bills calling for $83 billion in actual cuts to services on which Americans rely.
The proposed defense funding increases are similarly extreme. The budget is calling for $1.5 trillion in a $445 billion increase above this year, with $1.15 billion coming from annual appropriations and the remaining $350 billion from the budget reconciliation process. First off, the proposal is not tethered to actual policy. To be clear, the president first proposed this $1.5 trillion number nearly two months before the U.S. attacked Iran, so the administration can’t even credibly claim this is related to specific new requirements created by the war.
President Trump is asking for $152 million from Congress to try to transform Alcatraz, the popular tourist attraction, back into a maximum-security prison.
The request, included in a 2027 fiscal year budget proposal released on Friday, is the most concrete step the president has taken so far to realize an idea he first mused about last year on social media, when he said he wanted the island in the San Francisco Bay to be enlarged and rebuilt “to house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders.”
But the plan faces immense political and practical roadblocks. It has generated enormous pushback in San Francisco, where tourism is one of the biggest industries and Alcatraz is at the top of many visitors’ itineraries.
And Alcatraz, which has not housed an inmate in more than 60 years, is largely in ruins. It has no running water or sewage system. Much of the island, known as “The Rock,” is covered in bird droppings. All supplies must be brought in by boat.
The new White House budget proposal seeks $5 billion for the Bureau of Prisons to improve the nation’s “crumbling detention facilities,” including the makeover for Alcatraz. The $152 million would cover the first year of costs for the “President’s commitment to rebuild Alcatraz as a state-of-the-art secure prison facility,” it states. The full cost of restoring and reopening Alcatraz would be far higher.
Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco last year called the proposal to turn Alcatraz back into a federal prison “not a serious proposal.” Asked on Friday for his thoughts on the Trump administration’s budget allocation, his spokesman pointed back to those same comments and said he had nothing more to say.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, whose congressional district includes most of San Francisco, said that Alcatraz was a historic museum that belonged to the public. “Rebuilding Alcatraz into a modern prison is a stupid notion that would be nothing more than a waste of taxpayer dollars and an insult to the intelligence of the American people,” she said in a statement, vowing to fight the plan.
Meanwhile, Trump sent JD Vance to Hungary to campaign for Victor Orbán.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance is set to land in Budapest on Tuesday for a high-stakes intervention that underscores how far the White House is willing to go to shore up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán before the April 12 national election.
Orbán is flailing in the polls, as anti-corruption opposition candidate Péter Magyar surges ahead in his bid to claim power in Budapest after 16 years of leadership by the ruling Fidesz party.
Cat Nap, Susan Blackwood
Vance’s visit, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, was framed by Hungarian government spokesperson Zoltán Kovács as a celebration of deep ties between the two countries. “The visit highlights the strong and enduring alliance between Hungary and the United States,” he wrote on X on Friday.
The outspoken U.S. vice president will hold talks with the MAGA-allied Orbán and then give a public address, during a trip that directly involves Washington in the final stretch of a heated election campaign.
It echoes an American effort in Argentina last year, where U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent intervened to support President Javier Milei ahead of national midterm elections, to keep a key hemispheric, ideological ally in a strong position.
In multiple speeches and remarks over the 15 months since President Donald Trump returned to office, senior U.S. officials have made clear they believe Europe is on the wrong political path, and that the nationalist-populist Orbán is a model for the continent to follow.
The Hungarian prime minister has promoted his vision of illiberal democracy, while frequently clashing with Brussels over the EU’s direction on migration, Russia and minority rights.
Unbelievable.
Trump’s incompetent Defense Secretary has been on another firing spree.
The ousters of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Army Gen. David Hodne blindsided military leaders and have generated concern among defense officials about the implications for the war in Iran and the longer-term adoption of new tech and tactics.
Why it matters: George and Hodne join a growing list of generals and flag officers booted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. These abrupt exits have reshaped the Joint Chiefs of Staff, intel-collecting agencies and combatant commands.
Driving the news: George’s dismissal was motivated by clashing personalities and not disagreements over where the Army is headed, according to two U.S. officials.
One of those officials described the firing during a war as “insane.”
Hodne was late last year put in charge of Transformation and Training Command (T2COM), meant to accelerate the service’s tech development and deployment. The organization was birthed from the Army Transformation Initiative, which George helped lead.
“This doesn’t feel like a very strong, self-assured decision,” one of the officials said of Hegseth’s move.
Friction point: The firings come while elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are bound for the Middle East. The service is also responsible for integrated air-and-missile defenses.
“Here is a four-star general who is actively working to get equipment and people into theater — to protect U.S. forces — and you fire him? In the middle of a war?” a third U.S. official told Axios.
Hegseth has named a former aide, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, to replace George.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “paranoia” about Army Secretary Dan Driscoll taking his job fueled the firing of the Army’s top general, current and former administration officials tell The Post — as a top contender emerges to replace Driscoll if he’s canned next.
Hegseth on Thursday demanded the resignation of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George — Driscoll’s top aide — in the middle of the Iran war for reasons that were not publicly stated.
Marie Witte, Mittens
“This is all driven by the insecurity and paranoia that Pete has developed since Signalgate. Unfortunately, it is stoked by some of his closest aides who should be trying to calm the waters,” an official said, referring to Hegseth’s March 2025 group chat with national security officials that inadvertently included a reporter.
Two other Army generals — Gen. David Hodne of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command and Maj. Gen. William Green of the Army’s Chaplain Corps — were dismissed in the purge, with the department only saying “it was time for a leadership change.”
“[Hegseth] has got a big conflict with Driscoll. And he’s been told by the White House he can’t fire Driscoll, at least for the moment,” a source close to the Trump administration said.
“[Hegseth] is very concerned about being fired and he knows that Driscoll is one of the top contenders, or a natural contender, to succeed him. So what Pete has been doing is taking anyone he perceives to be close with Driscoll and going after them. And this is the latest and most spectacular [example] of that.”
Driscoll is a close friend of Vice President JD Vance, with whom he attended Yale Law School after both men served in the Iraq War. His name was floated as a possible Hegseth successor last summer and the Pentagon boss’s suspicions deepened last fall when Driscoll served as a Ukraine war negotiator.
“This is not just one of those things where Pete is focused on DEI. That’s not what this is about. He keeps going after the Army in particular,” the second person said.
I don’t know what’s going through Hegseth’s so-called mind other than his next drink. Dakinikat wrote about the “DEI” issue in the firing yesterday.
FBI agents prepared handwritten interview notes that contain names of possible corroborating witnesses and other information detailing a woman’s accusations that Jeffrey Epstein lured her into his deviant orbit when she was a teen on Hilton Head Island and sexually abused her.
The Post and Courier reviewed 30 pages of FBI agents’ notes, which have not been publicly released. The notes, made by agents in a series of 2019 interviews, offer a few new details about her claim that she traveled with Epstein to the New York area in the 1980s. She alleged that she encountered Donald Trump during a visit and was once forced into a sex act. The White House has assailed her claim, describing it as backed by no evidence.
Chanela by Grażyna Jeżak
The agents’ unredacted notes were not disclosed in the millions of Epstein documents released so far by the U.S. Department of Justice. They flesh out some aspects of her claims that she crossed paths with Epstein in the Lowcountry before he built a global sex-trafficking operation.
The Post and Courier compared the notes with official summaries, known as 302s, that agents prepared after the interviews. Some details in the handwritten notes never made it into the prepared summaries, which were heavily redacted by the Justice Department before their public release as required by law.
During one interview, for instance, an agent scribbled that the woman provided the names of four young teen girls who, by her account, attended a pool party on Hilton Head when Epstein came by. This was during the time when, she alleged, Epstein was sexually assaulting her and plying her with drugs and alcohol. Details about the four friends were not visible in the FBI’s 302 reports and may have been redacted in an effort to protect victim privacy.
It is unclear whether the FBI ever pursued leads offered by the alleged victim. One of the women identified in the interview notes as a high school friend told The Post and Courier that she was never contacted by the FBI.
Agents’ notes from a fourth interview with the alleged victim in 2019 were not available for The Post and Courier to review.
You can read the whole thing at the link. There’s no paywall this time. The Post and Courier has been doing great work on the Epstein story.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
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I’m sick and tired of wars. I’m even more sick and tired of Trump and his cabinet full of stupid idiots. I came of age during the Vietnam war. After that disaster finally ended, I really thought our leaders would stay out of unnecessary wars. But it didn’t happen. These men (goddess forbid we elect a woman president!) just have to prove their “manhood” by attacking other countries. I’m just plain sick of it.
It also appears that Trump and his gang of idiots didn’t plan for the obvious results of their war–rising prices and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. In addition, Trump’s “Secretary of War” is advocating for war crimes. That’s where things stand so far.
For Batoul Hamdan and her two children, seven-month-old Fatima and Jihad, three, Monday’s iftar, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, was special.
For a week, they had eaten to the sounds of bombs in their home in Arab Salim. Hamdan eventually decided to leave for Al-Nimiriya, the sleepy town where she had grown up. Surrounded by her parents and siblings in the family home, she hoped they could finally enjoy the festive mood of Ramadan.
They had just finished their meal when the bomb fell. The Israeli airstrike collapsed the two-storey building instantly, killing all eight members of the Hamdan family: grandparents Ahmad and Najib, their children, including Batoul, and grandchildren Fatima and Jihad – three generations wiped out in a moment.
On Thursday, only snarled rebar and broken concrete remained of the Hamdan family home. The fragments of their lives – a certificate of achievement from the children’s schooldays, cutlery from their cabinet, frayed purses – had been ejected by the force of the blast and now littered the ground.
“There was no warning before the strike. My own two kids started to cry, I picked them up and started to run away from the explosion when it happened,” said Qassem Ayoub, a neighbour and town police officer, as he stared at the wreckage. “Why were they targeted? I don’t know, ask the Israelis.”
Batoul and her loved ones were among the 773 Lebanese people – including more than 100 children – killed by Israel’s campaign in Lebanon since 2 March. They join a growing list of families completely wiped out by Israeli bombings, in a conflict whose death toll is rising faster than in any previous war in Lebanon.
Forty-one people were killed by Israeli airstrikes in Nabi Chit in the Bekaa valley in only five hours last Saturday, and 18 people died in a single night in the town of Sir el-Gharbiyeh on 8 March. The pace of death has stunned Lebanese people and left them struggling to keep up.
Do you think Netanyahu will stop these attacks on Lebanon if Trump calls off his war in Iran. I don’t.
BEIRUT (AP) — Fatima Nazha slept on the street for two days after she and her family fled their home in Beirut’s southern suburbs following an Israeli mass evacuation order.
All of the schools the government turned into shelters were full, and the family couldn’t afford a hotel or an apartment, so she and her husband eventually moved into a tent in the country’s biggest stadium while their kids and grandchildren found shelter near the southern coastal city of Sidon.
In just 10 days, more than 800,000 people in Lebanon have been displaced by war, just over a year since the last conflict uprooted over a million Lebanese from their homes. That’s one in every seven people in the tiny country, according to humanitarian organization the Norwegian Refugee Council. Many don’t have a place to stay, and the cash-strapped government has only been able to accommodate roughly 120,000 people as it scrambles to open shelters and bring in more supplies.
Nazha, who uses a wheelchair, said being forced from her home has been far more difficult this time than when Israel and Hezbollah were last at war more than a year ago. The strikes targeting the Iran-backed militant group have been more intense and unpredictable, and Israel’s evacuation order came abruptly, leaving her unable to gather all her belongings.
“The strikes used to target a specific area, but now they’re hitting all the areas,” she said, taking a drag off her cigarette. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Friday that more than 700 people, including 103 children, have died in the war.
Israel is planning to significantly expand its ground operation in Lebanon, aiming to seize the entire area south of the Litani River and dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, Israeli and U.S. officials say.
Why it matters: This could be the largest Israeli ground invasion of its northern neighbor since 2006, dragging Lebanon to the epicenter of the escalating war with Iran.
“We are going to do what we did in Gaza,” a senior Israeli official said, referring to the flattening of buildings Israel says Hezbollah uses to store weapons and launch attacks.
The big picture: An operation of this size and scale could lead to a prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s government is deeply alarmed that the renewed war — triggered by Hezbollah’s decision to launch rockets at Israel — will devastate the country.
The Trump administration backs a major Israeli operation to disarm Hezbollah, but is also pressing to limit the damage to the Lebanese state and pushing for direct Israel-Lebanon talks on a postwar agreement.
Driving the news: Until days ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was still trying to contain the Lebanon escalation in order to stay focused on Iran, according to Israeli officials.
That calculus changed Wednesday when Hezbollah launched more than 200 missiles in a massive coordinated attack with Iran, which fired dozens of its own.
“Before this attack we were ready for a ceasefire in Lebanon, but after it there is no way back from a massive operation,” a senior Israeli official said.
State of play: The IDF has had three armored and infantry divisions on the Lebanese border since the start of the Iran war, with some ground forces conducting limited incursions over the past two weeks.
By Kim Haskins
And what is Jared Kushner up to now that he got Trump to help Netanyahu with his bloodthirsty plans?
Jared Kushner, one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is trying to raise more money for his private equity firm from governments in the region.
Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.
As part of the fund-raising effort, Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has formed close ties with Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration.
PIF, which is already the largest and earliest investor in Affinity, invested $2 billion soon after the first Trump administration ended.
As part of that deal, the Saudis must be given the first chance to invest during any subsequent attempts by Affinity to raise funds, the two people said. Other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that invested earlier in Affinity, including those in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, are also expected to be asked for more, the people said.
Mr. Kushner’s fund-raising is expected to stretch on for the better part of this year.
The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term. Only a few weeks ago, in his role as Mr. Trump’s “peace envoy,” Mr. Kushner met in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran began shortly after those meetings concluded without a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, Kushner is not actually an employee of the Federal government. The corruption is breathtaking.
And what’s happening in in Iran these days? Well, it appears that the Trump gang didn’t plan for what to do if Iran cut off shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz–something they were warned about.
Of all the risks the global energy system has long faced, none was bigger or better known than the potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The narrow passageway out of the Persian Gulf is both vital — serving as the only gateway to the rest of the world for huge amounts of oil and natural gas — and extremely vulnerable to attacks.
But despite being widely recognized as a potential choke point, the strait remains the only way to export most of the energy produced in the region. That has come into sharp relief in the second week of the war in the Middle East, as the near-closure of the waterway sent oil prices soaring above $100 a barrel for the first time in almost four years.
The reason there is no true alternative comes down to a combination of geography, political tensions and economic competition among the region’s oil powers. There have been efforts to circumvent the strait, notably by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But the pipelines through those countries can carry only a small fraction of the energy produced in the Persian Gulf.
By Mathias Hauser
For many other energy-producing countries in the region, the only way to avoid the strait would be to lay a pipeline across a neighboring country — an expensive and politically fraught endeavor. Take Qatar, one of the world’s biggest natural gas exporters. Its only land border is with Saudi Arabia — a country that cut off diplomatic ties and closed that border during a regional spat resolved five years ago. Plus, any pipeline would itself be vulnerable to Iranian attacks.
“There’s nothing which is totally secure here,” said John Browne, a former chief executive of the London-based oil giant BP, once known as the Anglo-Iranian oil company. “In the end, someone with bad intention can do all sorts of things to oil and gas infrastructure.”
Some oil analysts also assumed that, if the time came, the United States, which has a keen interest in keeping energy markets stable, would use its military might to keep the strait passable.
Oh really? I guess these “analysts” didn’t consider the fact that Donald Trump is a psychopath who couldn’t care less about anyone but himself and his childish needs. Use the gift link if you want to read more.
Now that the shit has hit the fan, and prices on gas and just about everything else are rising rapidly, Trump has decided to send in some more troops.
About 2,500 Marines aboard as many as three warships are heading to the Middle East from the Indo-Pacific region, as Iran increases its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. officials said.
The shift, earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes as Iran’s response to nearly two weeks of aerial bombardment and long-range artillery strikes has proved more resilient than Trump administration officials anticipated.
The Marines will join more than 50,000 American troops in the region. The new deployment comes as Iran’s attacks on and near the strait have choked maritime traffic through the essential waterway, rocking the global economy. It was unclear how the new deployment would be used….
Last week, President Trump said he might order Navy warships to escort merchant ships through the crucial oil supply route, which U.S. forces did for a period of time in the late 1980s during similar tensions with Iran.
U.S. forces have carried out “large-scale” strikes on Kharg Island, a critical hub of Iran’s Gulf oil operations, with the country responding by threatening to strike U.S. allies’ oil facilities if any of its infrastructure is damaged.
U.S. Central Command said Saturday that naval mine storage facilities and missile storage bunkers were among targets destroyed in the “precision strike” on the island, hitting “90 Iranian military targets” while “preserving the oil infrastructure.”
Kharg Island, a tiny but strategic island 15 miles off the coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf, is home to an oil terminal that ships 90% of the country’s oil exports. There are also military capabilities there, including air defenses and mines buried underground.
Announcing the strike in a post on Truth Social late Friday, President Donald Trump said that U.S. forces had “totally obliterated every MILITARY target in Iran’s crown jewel, Kharg Island.”
Trump just loves that word “obliterated.”
The island’s oil terminal has so far been unscathed in the war, according to oil market research firm Energy Intelligence, and the president said the island’s oil infrastructure was spared in Friday’s attack, but could be struck down the road.
“Should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision,” Trump said, as Iran has actively interfered with shipping in the strait for several days.
A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, two security officials said.
The projectile landed within the embassy’s boundaries after the Green Zone, the heavily fortified district in central Baghdad that houses Iraqi government institutions and foreign embassies, added the security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to speak with the press.
Video obtained by The Associated Press showed smoke billowing from inside the compound.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran openly threatened a neighboring country’s non-U.S. assets for the first time Saturday, warning people to immediately evacuate the busiest port in the Middle East and two others in the United Arab Emirates as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran entered its third week.
By Rudi Hurzlmeier
A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, and debris from an intercepted Iranian drone hit an oil facility in the UAE, further increasing global anxiety about oil supplies.
Iran threatened to attack cities in the UAE, home to Dubai and one of the world’s busiest airports, saying the U.S. used “ports, docks and hideouts” there to launch strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island, without providing evidence. It urged people to evacuate areas where it said U.S. forces were sheltering, naming Dubai’s Jebel Ali port — the Mideast’s busiest — as well as Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa port and Fujairah port.
Iran has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Arab Gulf neighbors during the war, but it said it was targeting U.S. assets, even as hits or attempts were reported on civilian ones such as airports and oil fields.
Back here at home, Pete Hegseth is in favor of committing war crimes. He’s already committed war crimes with his fishing boat strikes. His troops also committed a war crime when they sank Iranian ships and failed to attempt to rescue survivors. Then yesterday he said advocated for another war crime.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth offhandedly made a remark about the Trump administration’s attack on Iran during his speech on Friday that experts warned, if he’s serious, could be a war crime — even just for him to say out loud.
“No quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” said Hegseth. “Yet some in the press just can’t stop. More fake news from CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
The phrase “no quarter” is often used colloquially in a political setting, but in a military context, it means any enemy combatants will be killed with no allowance for surrender — something that, as experts on X and Bluesky were swift to point out, is a violation of both international law and the U.S. military code.
“Went largely unnoticed but Hegseth on Iran said the U.S. would provide ‘no quarter, no mercy for our enemies’ during his press conference today,” wrote Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward. “‘No quarter’ is a violation of international humanitarian law.” He provided a link to the relevant provisions of the Geneva Convention.
“Today, Hegseth said: ‘No quarter, no mercy for our enemies.’ But the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual (pp. 209-210) says: ‘It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given,'” wrote Claremont McKenna College professor Jack Pitney.
“Former USG war crimes lawyer here,” wrote International Crisis Group senior adviser Brian Finucane. “Apropos of SecDef’s remarks this morning: Denial of quarter — even the declaration of no quarter — is a war crime. And recognized as such by the US Government. From DoD’s Manual for Military Commissions.” He screenshotted the section of the manual, which stated denial of quarter is punishable by up to life in prison.
“Declaring that no quarter will be given is straightforwardly prohibited under international humanitarian law,” wrote Stanford law professor Tom Dannenbaum. “When done to threaten an adversary, the declaration itself amounts to a war crime.”
“Yet another thing to put in our back pocket,” wrote Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect. “‘Ship em to the Hague’ is a completely valid option for a long and growing list of people who need to be dealt with.”
Donald Trump is lost in his fog of war. He compounds confusion with improvised fabrications as his naive expectation of a lightning victory has been sunk in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, he felt certain, would easily follow the “perfect scenario” of Venezuela, accede to naming a leader who would instantly do his bidding, and there would be no disruption of the oil markets – “a strong game plan”, stated Karoline Leavitt, his White House press secretary, who defends each of his changeable excuses with equal ferocity.
By Kim Haskins
There may be few if any facts underlying the delusions upon which Trump constructs his vapid explanations and evanescent strategies. The belief that coherent sense can be made out of Trump’s shuffling words is a weakness of the rational mind that refuses to accept the impulses of the inveterate demagogue for what they are. Searching for reason in the jungle of Trump’s tales may compel hopelessly sensible people to superimpose logic where there is none in order to satisfy the need for some semblance of soundness.
Trump’s erratic efforts to reframe his rationale further expose his incompetence and unintelligibility, utterly predictable but now lethal on a global scale. His stream of sputtering remarks has, however, clearly established the ground that should be explored by congressional inquiries into the war’s origins, planning and conduct.
Trump is also at war with the English language. His war is not a war, he insists, but a “short-term excursion”, a semantic dodge to skirt congressional and international accountability. Then, when asked whether it’s an excursion or a war, he replied: “Well, it’s both. It’s an excursion that will keep us out of a war.” His rhetorical legerdemain is the equivalent of René Magritte’s painting of a pipe with the caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” – “This is not a pipe.” The title Magritte gave to his painting was The Treachery of Images. Orwell or Magritte? Propaganda or surrealism?
Trump has declared he will force “regime change” or negotiate with some unnamed personage in the regime who happens to have been recently killed. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said. Trump demands “unconditional surrender” or he declares the war “very complete” after an hour-long conversation with Vladimir Putin, after Putin pledged “unwavering support” to the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khomeini, the 56-year-old son of the assassinated 86-year-old supreme leader, about whose ascension Trump said he was “not happy” and called him a “lightweight”.
I hope you’ll go read the rest. Blumenthal is good.
That’s all I have for today. I hope you’re enjoying your weekend, despite the ugly war news.
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Yesterday I tried to watch a press conference on Trump’s Iran conflict by Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine, but it was unwatchable. Hegseth waved his arms around and yelled over-the-top threats, and Caine sort of tried to sound reasonable; but none of it made sense. No one in the Trump administration has a clue why we’re in this “war.” I really do think it’s another distraction from the Epstein files.
This war is notable not for its use of Artificial Intelligence, but for the fact that it is the first war that feels like it’s been launched by A.I: It’s all been done on a level less than thought. Trump’s remarks, Hegseth’s speeches; they all sound like autocompletes or snippets of half-remembered things. When Trump bellows, “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” he knows not what it means; he just heard it somewhere, probably on TV.
The barrage of clichés from Hegseth’s mouth is astonishing—“Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be….” Then General Caine (what a name) joins in the fusillade: “Profound sadness and gratitude….wounded warriors…standing shoulder to shoulder…making steady progress…clear-eyed…quiet professionals…call balls and strikes.” Clear-eyed, quiet professionals are making steady progress calling balls and strikes on our wounded warriors, to whom we feel eternal gratitude. We may run out of interceptors, but we are well-stocked with hackneyed phrases. And the munitions may be “precision guided,” but the language is necessarily vague. Too bad they can’t bore the enemy to death.
Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine try to make sense of the Iran war.
The images, too, are familiar and shopworn for anyone who can remember as far back as the First Persian Gulf War. The grainy footage of “precision strikes” (another cliché) on “key targets.” The night sky of a Middle Eastern metropolis illuminated with fire and smoke—we’ve all seen Shock and Awe (2002), dir. George W. Bush and Michael Bay—Tomahawks streaking into the sky. The jets screaming off the decks of carriers; The video edits using “the Macarena” or “Fortunate Son,” meant to recall Forrest Gump, itself already a pastiche of Vietnam movies. I’m sure something is reassuring about it all to a Fox viewer approaching senescence. But also for the young who have processed everything through video games. They’ve seen this movie before. (That’s another one, in case you didn’t notice.) It’s a kind of medley of America’s wars; the themes come and go: oil crisis…Iran…Kuwait…boots on the ground…Patriot missiles…Scuds. Even the sinking of an apparently unarmed Iranian warship by a submarine was a callback: Hegseth reminded us it was the first time a US sub had sunk an enemy vessel with a torpedo since WWII. It had no strategic or tactical purpose; it was just meant to generate an image: a ship going down viewed through the crosshairs of a periscope. Something out of Run Silent Run Deep, watched on a Sunday afternoon. Or the Victory at Sea doc,not for nothing, a movie that Trump obsesses over. Of course, “unrestricted submarine warfare” and abandoning survivors at sea recalls a coldhearted U-Boat skipper more than Clark Gable, but no matter.
In the past, propaganda served the purposes of war; now war serves the purposes of propaganda. But the blood remains real.
A.I. will supposedly give us fully automated wars in the future, but it’s here, right now. There’s a blind automatism to this war; It’s a war without thought or deliberation, public or private. It’s war as autocomplete. Of course, we were gonna “do” Iran. It was just what was next. Another barrage of clichés: “American blood on their hands…theocratic lunatics…the mullahs…We’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years.” The last one is particularly Orwellian: We’ve always been at war with West Asia.
Read more at the Substack link above.
Here’s the latest news and opinion about Trump’s “war.”
The Pentagon tried to hide the number of U.S. injuries in the war until Reuters did an independent investigation. Now they say there are 140 wounded.
As many as 150 U.S. troops have been wounded in the 10-day-old war with Iran, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
The casualty figure has not been previously reported. Prior to Reuters’ publication of the figure, the Pentagon had only disclosed eight U.S. personnel seriously injured.
In a statement after Reuters published its report, the Pentagon estimated the figure to be approximately 140 wounded and said the vast majority of them were minor.
“Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 140 U.S. service members have been wounded over 10 days of sustained attacks,” said chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell.
He said 108 of the wounded service members had already returned to duty.
Parnell said the eight seriously wounded service members were receiving the highest level of medical care.
Reuters could not determine the types of injuries and whether they include traumatic brain injuries, which are common after exposure to blasts.
Iran has launched retaliatory strikes against U.S. military bases since the start of the conflict on Feb. 28. It has also struck diplomatic missions in Arab Gulf states as well as hotels and airports and damaged oil infrastructure.
At least three ships were hit on Wednesday in and around the vital oil route of the Strait of Hormuz, according to a British maritime monitoring group, as the Middle East war chokes off one of the key conduits for the global oil trade.
An image released by the Royal Thai Navy shows a tanker near the Strait of Hormuz that was attacked on Wednesday. Iran claimed responsibility. Credit…Royal Thai Navy, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Iran appeared to claim responsibility for at least one of the attacks. Alireza Tangsiri, the naval commander in Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, named one of the ships that was struck, the Mayuree Naree, in a post on social media, saying they had “ignored the warnings” from Iran, and “ended up getting caught.”
He added: “Any vessel that intends to pass must obtain permission from Iran.”
There were three separate reports, according to United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a British monitoring agency. Iran fired at targets across the Middle East on Wednesday, but did not explicitly claim responsibility for the strikes on the ships.
Three strikes on ships in a single morning appeared to represent an unusual uptick: The U.K.M.T.O. said it had received reports of 13 attacks in total since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began on Feb. 28.
One cargo vessel was struck “by an unknown projectile” north of Oman in the Straits of Hormuz, resulting in a fire onboard, the agency said. The Oman News Agency said the country’s Maritime Security Center received a report indicating that the Mayuree Naree, a commercial vessel flying the flag of Thailand, was hit off the Omani coast.
On Feb. 18, as President Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.
Even during the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran last June, Mr. Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Mr. Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that — the second time around — Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.
The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.
U.S. officials have had to adjust plans on the fly, from hastily ordering the evacuation of embassies to developing policy proposals to reduce gas prices.
President Trump’s closed-door meeting about his long-term plan in Iran and overall justification for the war has been blasted as “incoherent” by a senator who attended.
Chris Murphy, a Democrat representing Connecticut, unloaded on the White House in a troubling X thread after the secret briefing on “Operation Epic Fury.”
Sen. Chris Murphy warned about the lack of a plan in a worrying X thread.
He said there doesn’t seem to be a clear goal apart from “destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories.”
“I obviously can’t disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are,” he said.
Several of the White House’s stated reasons for the war didn’t even come up, Murphy said, with not a single mention of plans to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. “This is, uh…surprising…since Trump says over and over this is a key goal,” he said.
The Trump administration also now claims that regime change is not the goal of the operation, despite the president initially framing it that way for the public.
Murphy suggested that if the goal is not to ensure a transition of power, the U.S. will just face more issues further down the line. He said: “So, they are going to spend hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars, get a whole bunch of Americans killed, and a hardline regime – probably a MORE anti-American hardline regime – will still be in charge.”
He said there didn’t seem to be a clear goal apart from “destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories.”
“But the question that stumped them: what happens when you stop bombing and they restart production? They hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, endless war,” he said.
President Trump told Axios in a brief phone interview Wednesday that the war with Iran will end “soon” because there is “practically nothing left to target.”
“Little this and that… Any time I want it to end, it will end,” Trump said during the five-minute call.
Why it matters: Even as Trump publicly signals his operation has largely accomplished its objectives, U.S. and Israeli officials say there has been no internal directive on when fighting might stop.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday the war will continue “without any time limit, for as long as necessary, until we achieve all the objectives and decisively win the campaign.”Israeli and
U.S. officials say they are preparing for at least two more weeks of strikes in Iran.
It sounds like Israel is actually going to decide when the war ends.
On Tuesday, the U.S. received intelligence that suggested Iran has started laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most critical chokepoints for oil supply.
Officials say it’s unclear how many mines Iran has deployed, but the assessment is that the number is very small.
What he’s [Trump] saying: “The war is going great. We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible, even in the original six-week period,” Trump told Axios.
At a press conference on Monday evening, President Trump said his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was one of a handful of top advisers who convinced him to launch major combat operations in Iran. The disclosure raises additional questions about the role of Kushner, who is being paid tens of millions of dollars annually by Middle Eastern governments that were reportedly lobbying Trump to attack Iran.
Jared Kushner is acknowledged during the State of the Union on February 24, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee,Getty Images)
“The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return… based on what Steve and Jared and Pete and others were telling me, Marco is so involved, I thought they were going to attack us,” Trump said, referring to Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Kushner, who has no formal title.
“Within a week, [Iran was] going to attack us, 100 percent. They were ready,” Trump said at a different event Monday. “They had all these missiles, far more than anyone thought, and they were going to attack us.”
Witkoff and Kushner were dispatched by Trump to Geneva to participate in mediation with their Iranian counterparts, in what was described as a last-ditch effort to avoid war. Kushner’s participation violated his pledge not to be involved in foreign policy in a second Trump administration. Instead, Kushner had said he was focused on running his private equity fund, Affinity Partners, which has raised billions of dollars from foreign governments.
Kushner’s largest investor is the Saudi Arabian government, which provided Kushner with $2 billion in funding in 2021. Each year, Saudi Arabia pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, $25 million, as a “management fee.” Meaning he has received in excess of $100 million from the Saudi government over the last few years.
And Witkoff is a Russian asset. I will never forgive the idiots who voted for Trump because they just didn’t want a Black woman to be president.
Trump’s fear of the Epstein files is behind this idiotic war. No one will ever convince me otherwise. Here’s the latest on the Epstein story.
State investigators in New Mexico on Monday searched a 7,600-acre property that once belonged to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The search came after documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act showed no record of federal investigators ever searching the property, known as Zorro Ranch, despite a number of years-old civil suits that accused Epstein of sexually assaulting girls there — allegations over which he was never charged.
“This search is part of the criminal investigation announced by the New Mexico Department of Justice on February 19th into allegations of illegal activity at Epstein’s ranch prior to Epstein’s 2019 death,” the state agency said in a statement.
“The New Mexico Department of Justice appreciates the cooperation of the current property owners in granting access for the search and extends its thanks to the ranch staff for their professionalism,” the statement said, and will “continue to keep the public appropriately informed, support the survivors, and follow the facts wherever they lead.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, ordered the search. His office announced its probe into Epstein last month, days after state lawmakers passed legislation to begin their own investigation into Epstein’s activities in the state.
The Legislature’s $2.5 million investigation, which has subpoena power, aims to close gaps in state law that may have allowed Epstein to operate in New Mexico with impunity. The committee is expected to release interim findings in July and a final report by the end of the year.
The bill’s co-sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Andrea Romero, said when the legislation passed last month that Epstein “was basically doing anything he wanted in this state without any accountability whatsoever.”
The reach of the mysteries involving Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico now span several centuries — as new documents reveal that the FBI’s Albuquerque office was investigating whether Epstein had a stolen historical artifact that dates back hundreds of years stored on his sprawling NM property.
Zorro Ranch
The artifact was a “death bell” that was once housed at the San Jose de Gracia Mission Church in Las Trampas, a village in Northern New Mexico between Sante Fe and Taos. The church was built in 1760 and is considered one of the best examples of Spanish Colonial architecture in the Southwest U.S. It is also a National Historic Landmark.
The lore about the missing church bell only adds to the questions about why the Justice Department never searched Epstein’s ranch back in 2019 — when at least two victims alleged they were sexually assaulted there, and another tipster claimed that two girls’ bodies are possibly buried there….
The “Death bell,” as it came to be called, was smaller than the other bell. During the church’s restoration in the 1930s, the bell was stolen.
In November 2019, Timothy Lopez told the FBI in Albuquerque, New Mexico that he recalled seeing Epstein’s ranch featured in a local real estate magazine in 2014 or 2015. In the photos accompanying the article, he said he noticed a room filed with Spanish Colonial art — and noticed a bell he thought might be the Death bell that had been stolen more than 80 years earlier.
The 7,400-ace property, which Epstein called “Zorro Ranch,” was purchased by Epstein from former New Mexico Governor Bruce King in 1993. The disgraced financier built a hilltop mansion with a private runway on the property, which was sold after Epstein’s death to the family of former Texas state Sen. Don Huffines, who won the Republican primary for Texas state comptroller last week.
After Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, the FBI search Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, but did not immediately search Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean until after his August 2019 death. They never searched his New Mexico compound, despite having evidence of crimes that occurred there, including the tip about the stolen church bell….
the documents about the sexual assaults that were reported to have occurred on the property led to public outcry in recent weeks. That that led to New Mexico authorities finally on Monday beginning a long overdue search of the property. Of course, by now, any evidence of any sex crimes committed there has likely disappeared just like the long-vanished death bell.
The FBI claimed they abandoned the investigation of Zorro Ranch because they lacked enough evidence to get a search warrant. It will be interesting to see what New Mexico authorities find.
The Social Security Administration’s internal watchdog isinvestigating a complaint that alleges a former U.S. DOGE Service employee claimed he had access to two highly sensitive agency databases and planned to share the information with his private employer — a claim that, if true, would constitute an unprecedented breach of security protocols at an agency that serves more than 70 million Americans.
The agency’s inspector general is investigating the disclosure and has alerted members of Congress of its existence, according to a letter by the acting inspector general to top members of four congressional committees reviewed by The Washington Post andtwo people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive deliberations. The inspector general’s office has also shared the disclosure with the Government Accountability Office, which has been conducting its own audit of DOGE’s access to data, according to one of the people.The Post has reviewed the complaint and spoken with the whistleblower, who issued the complaint anonymouslyfor fear of retaliation.
According to the disclosure, the former DOGE software engineer, who worked at the Social Security Administration last year before starting a job at a government contractor in October, allegedly told several co-workers that he possessed two tightly restricted databases of U.S. citizens’ information, and had at least one on a thumb drive. The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names. The complaint does not include specific dates of when he is said to have told colleagues this information, but at least one of the alleged events unfolded around early January, according to the complaint. While working at DOGE, the engineer had approved access to Social Security data.
According to the complaint, he allegedly told the whistleblower that he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.]” The engineer told colleagues that once he had removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it into the company’s systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.
The complaint does not allege thatthe engineer was successful in uploading the data to the company’s system.
The Post is not naming the former DOGE member or company because it has not independently confirmed the accusations in the complaint.
Kristi Noem is apparently leaving the Department of Homeland Security with dozens of unsigned contracts on her desk—including payments owed to a facility holding migrant children.
The backlog is the fallout from a policy Noem, 54, imposed that required every DHS contract worth $100,000 or more—which covers nearly all of the agency’s agreements—to receive her personal sign-off before taking effect. The rule proved so disruptive that some vendors began billing the department in chunks of $99,999 each just to get paid.
“There’s a mountain of backed-up contracts and invoices on her desk that the new guy will just have to deal with,” a source familiar with the situation at DHS told Axios.
“From everything that I’ve heard, it’s still a giant s–t show up there,” a source familiar with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) delays told the outlet, referring to DHS leadership.
“The ramifications of her tenure are going to be felt for years and years and years and years,” the source added. “We’re not really going to know exactly how bad it is until we have a major hurricane that unfortunately impacts someplace in the United States.”
The disruption, Axios says, is already reaching real facilities. At the family detention center in Dilley, Texas—the only long-term immigration facility in the country holding migrants’ children—government payments lapsed in early March, with roughly 700 people detained there as of mid-February.
That’s it for me today. As you can tell, the Iran situation is freezing out other stories.
Take care, everyone.
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Painting of a cat resting on a pillow next to a Muslim scholar in Cairo, by John Frederick Lewis (1805–1876)
Today I’m featuring Persian cats. It’s not the Iranian people’s fault that Trump is raining down hellfire on their country. According to Wikipedia, cats are the preferred pet in Iran; and Persian cats are the local favorite.
The Persian cat, also known as the Persian Longhair or simply Persian, is a long-haired traditional breed of cat characterised by a round face and petite, but not flat and not smashed in, muzzle. The short flat nose was created in the US from in-breeding and causes breathing difficulties in the breed, whereas, the traditional Persian breed has a petite nose which enables them to breathe without difficulties.
The first documented ancestors of Persian cats might have been imported into Italy from Khorasan as early as around 1620, but this has not been proven. Instead, there is stronger evidence for a longhaired cat breed being exported from Afghanistan and Iran/Persia from the 19th century onwards.[2][3][4] Persian cats have been widely recognised by the North-West European cat fancy since the 19th century,[5] and after World War II by breeders from North America, Australia and New Zealand.[5] Some cat fancier organisations’ breed standards subsume the Himalayan and Exotic Shorthair as variants of this breed, while others generally treat them as separate breeds.
The selective breeding carried out by breeders has allowed the development of a wide variety of coat colours,[5] but has also led to the creation of increasingly flat-faced Persian cats. Favoured by fanciers, this head structure can bring with it several health problems. As is the case with the Siamese breed, there have been efforts by some breeders to preserve the older type of cat, the Traditional Persian, which has a more pronounced muzzle.
In Islam, the domestic cat is regarded as ritually clean and thus holds a unique status in comparison to other companion animals, such as the domestic dog. Under Islamic law, cats are permitted to be kept by Muslims within their homes and other private and public spaces, including mosques. Likewise, if a person’s food or drink is sampled by a cat, it is not rendered impure or unfit for consumption, and water from which a cat has drunk is permissible to use for ablution.
Cats are believed by Muslims to possess barakah, which refers to a blessing power that is said to flow through those who are spiritually closest to God.[1][2] As such, they are widely acclaimed as the “quintessential pet” for a Muslim household.
I hope these cats will provide some respite from the horrible news.
Trump is really sounding drunk with power (what else is new?) on his illegal war on Iran. Yesterday, he demanded “unconditional surrender” from the Iranians.
President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Friday that there would be no deal to end the U.S. war against Iran without an “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” by Iran.
Trump said that after a surrender and “the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”
“IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!)” Trump wrote, echoing his “Make America Great” movement’s name.
Trump’s demand came as Iran has yet to pick a leader to replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed last weekend in an airstrike at the beginning of the war by the U.S. and Israel.
What the hell does that mean? It’s not even a declared war.
President Trump told Axios Friday that his demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” could mean the complete destruction of the regime’s military capabilities — not necessarily a formal surrender.
“Unconditional surrender could be that [the Iranians] announce it. But it could also be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with,” he said in a phone interview.
Why it matters: Trump’s explanation came hours after he appeared to leave no visible off-ramp for Iran, ruling out any kind of “deal” as he demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” in a post on Truth Social.
— White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said on Fox News that “unconditional surrender” means Trump determining “that Iran can no longer pose a threat to the U.S. and our troops in the Middle East.”
— Leavitt listed U.S. objectives as destroying Iran’s navy, eliminating its ballistic missile threat, ensuring it cannot obtain a nuclear weapon and weakening its regional proxies.
The president of Iran has rejected Donald Trump’s call for the country’s unconditional surrender as a “dream”, while issuing a rare apology for Iranian attacks that hit neighbouring states, even as missiles and drones continued to strike Gulf countries.
Moder type Persian cat
In a prerecorded address broadcast on state television on Saturday, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the country would never capitulate, responding to remarks by the US president, who said on Friday that only Iran’s total submission could bring the war to an end.
Iran’s enemies, Pezeshkian said, “must take their dream of the Iranian people’s unconditional surrender to their graves”, in remarks that further escalate the eighth day of conflict, which has choked global oil supplies and cut world air travel.
During his speech, Pezeshkian also issued an apology to neighbouring states for Iran’s recent “actions”, in an apparent attempt to ease regional anger after Iranian strikes hit civilian targets in Gulf Arab countries.
Tehran has responded to attacks on its territory by targeting Israel, but also Gulf Arab states that host US military installations, while Israel has also launched intense strikes on Lebanon, where the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah is based.
President Donald Trump announced plans to launch yet more strikes against Iran on Saturday, escalating his threats as the conflict with Iran enters its second week.
“Today Iran will be hit very hard!” he wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning. “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.”
Islamic miniature depicting Abu Hudhayfa ibn Utba (right) informing As’ad ibn Zurara that he has converted to Islam, with the presence of a cat denoting his home’s ritual purity.
Pezeshkian also said his country would no longer strike its neighbors in the Middle East — so long as attacks against Iran weren’t being launched from those countries. Trump took credit for the new policy, writing on Truth Social that it “was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack.”
“It is the first time that Iran has ever lost, in thousands of years, to surrounding Middle Eastern Countries,” he said. “They have said, ‘Thank you President Trump.’ I have said, ‘You’re welcome!’ Iran is no longer the ‘Bully of the Middle East,’ they are, instead, ‘THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,’ and will be for many decades until they surrender or, more likely, completely collapse!”
Trump is really full of himself. He even thinks he should help decide who Iran’s next leader will be!
Meanwhile, things here at home aren’t going so well.
Donald Trump won reelection on the promise of restoring the economy and eliminating illegal immigration.
But in the last week, both issues have threatened to turn into liabilities: A stagnant labor market and soaring gas prices amid the Iran conflict are hammering the economy, and the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security has cast new light on the administration’s increasingly unpopular immigration agenda. The economic backdrop has grown ominous — Wall Street analysts are warning that surging oil prices could lead to stagflation — and the blitzkrieg of bad news has jeopardized the GOP’s ability to keep voters focused on Trump administration policies that were designed to help with the rising cost of living.
“If you combine an economy that people don’t like with a prolonged war that you know nobody in his base believes they voted for, that’s a toxic problem,” said one Trump ally granted anonymity to speak freely. While Trump isn’t on the ballot this year, his party needs the president’s poll numbers to improve to keep the House and Senate….
The Iran conflict has put immense upward pressure on oil and gas –- prices at the pump have climbed by more than 11 percent in a week. Now, with employers shedding payroll and Trump pressing reset on who’s leading his immigration agenda, the president is on the backfoot on the two issues he needs to own for his party to win the midterms….
The president, meanwhile, is also struggling with what was once his strongest and most defining issue — immigration. While the number of people crossing the southern border has fallen significantly, in part due to Trump administration efforts, the widely shared images of aggressive enforcement actions across the country have left even some of his supporters wincing. Other conservatives, still, are unhappy that those efforts have not gone far enough, falling short of the “mass deportations” he promised on the campaign trail.
Polling underscores the erosion of support. A recent NBC News poll found that 49 percent of adults strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of border security and immigration, up from 38 percent last summer. Nearly three-quarters of the poll’s respondents said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be reformed or abolished.
Trump’s Thursday dismissal of Noem came after months of increasing frustration inside the White House with how she ran the department.
Consider three of the biggest developments in our politics right now: We just learned that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, a capstone to a terrible year in terms of job creation. President Trump has fired widely despised Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a key architect of his mass deportations. And reports are indicating that the killing of scores of Iranian schoolchildren might have been the handiwork of the United States.
What links all these things? In addition to the massive human toll they’re inflicting, they suggest that Trump is about to pull off a unique trifecta. He is squandering the advantage he and Republicans have enjoyed in recent years on three major GOP-friendly issues: The economy, immigration, and national security.
Painting by Tatjana Cechun
This isn’t meant as a political gotcha; it has important ideological and policy implications. When Trump took office last year, it was reasonable to fear that the American public would rally behind mass deportations and tariffs—that is, embrace two of the main tenets of right-wing nationalism. Meanwhile, the launch of the largest military attack in the Mideast in decades might have plausibly produced a rally-around-the-war-president effect.
None of that is happening. And that’s significant in not-so-obvious ways.
Let’s start with Trump and national security. According to an extraordinary video analysis by The New York Times, the horrific bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran—which killed 175 people, many children—occurred while the United States was conducting missile strikes in the area aimed at a nearby Iranian naval base.
What’s more, Reuters reports that military investigators now believe U.S. forces likely bombed the school. We should suspend final judgement, of course. But it’s looking very much like this atrocity—one of the worst massacres of civilians in memory—is the result of Trump’s war. Whatever we learn about it, there will inevitably be more such horrors.
Now look at this in the context of remarks from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House adviser Stephen Miller. Hegseth recently declared that the United States is dispensing with “stupid rules of engagement” and will no longer fight “politically correct wars.” Miller recently enthused that Trump’s military doesn’t have “its hands tied behind its back,” mocked the very idea of human rights, and insisted that “strength” and “force” and “power” are fundamentally all that matter in the international arena.
But we’re now learning why we have the sort of constraints on military conduct these men ridicule. “Trump, Miller and Hegseth’s FAFO approach to the use of official government force and violence comes with considerable risk,” Democratic Congressman Adam Smith told me, employing the acronym for “Fuck Around and Find Out.” Atrocities like the school bombing, he added, show the perils that come when we “brazenly dismiss any sort of rules of engagement designed to protect the lives and rights of civilians.”
Just a bit more:
The swaggering certainty of Hegseth and Miller, those two giants of American statecraft, is what’s notable here. As Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, at times like this you can almost smell MAGA’s “bloodlust.” Clearly they have no doubt the public will rally behind this supposed display of Trump’s “strength.” Or maybe they don’t think it matters what the public thinks.
But it does matter. Data analyst G. Elliott Morris averaged high quality polling on Trump’s Iran invasion, and found that only 38 percent of respondents approve—the lowest initial support for an American war perhaps ever. Trump’s overall approval has also dropped a hair since the bombing began—it’s hovering at around 39-58—leading Morris to conclude that no rally-around-the-flag effect is materializing.
Also note that a CNN poll just showed that 59 percent don’t trust Trump to make the right decisions regarding the use of force in Iran, suggesting already-entrenched skepticism of Trump’s commander-in-chief abilities exactly when a “war president” boomlet might be expected to kick in. The school bombing will make this worse. In short, Trump has no built-in national security advantage. If anything he’s viewed as bad on it.
Read the rest at TNR.
Two more stories that show the callous nature of Trump’s war:
The U.S. torpedoing of an Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka this week may have violated the Geneva Conventions by failing to help rescue sailors from the stricken warship, an act that could potentially endanger American service members in this and future wars.
The 312-foot Dena and its 130-member crew, many of them musicians in the Iranian navy band, had just finished participating in an Indian government naval exercise and cultural exchange that the U.S. Navy had also participated in and were on the way home on Wednesday. After clearing Sri Lanka, it was struck by a torpedo fired from a U.S. Navy submarine about 20 miles from the island’s southern tip. The weapon appears to have ruptured the hull from beneath, and the warship quickly sank. The submarine did not attempt to rescue Iranian sailors in the water.
Painting of a calico Persian cat, by Lynn Lachapelle Seguin
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bragged about how the attack featured the first American use of a torpedo to sink a ship since World War II. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, narrating a video clip of the attack, used the same gloating tone. “An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death,” he intoned.
Hegseth had previously mocked the “stupid rules of engagement” that aim to limit civilian deaths and other actions that could constitute war crimes.
“There is an affirmative duty to rescue under the Geneva Conventions,” said Mark Nevitt, a former Navy lawyer in the judge advocate general corps and now a law professor at Emory University.
He and other legal experts warn that disregarding those and other rules invites mistreatment, even death, to Americans who are shipwrecked or captured.
In a preview of an upcoming 60 Minutes interview released on Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth mocked “Iranians that think they’re gonna live” while answering a question on reports that Russia provided Iran with intel to target American soldiers in the ongoing conflict.
In the clip, CBS News’ Major Garrett cited three sources “telling us that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran on U.S. positions and movements.”
“The average American might hear that and think that’s a big and dangerous deal,” continued Garrett. “Is it?”
“Well, we’re tracking everything,” responded Hegseth. “We have the best intelligence in the world… President [DonaldTrump] has an incredible knack at knowing how to mitigate those risks, and so the American people can rest assured their commander in chief is well aware of who’s talking to who, and anything that shouldn’t be happening — whether it’s in public or backchanneled — is being confronted and confronted strongly.”
“So the American people can therefore expect conversations with the Russians to stop this?” clarified Garrett.
“Well, I,” Hegseth stumbled. “President Trump, as people have seen, has a unique relationship with a lot of world leaders, where he can get things done that other presidents — certainly [former President] JoeBiden —
“Well, I,” Hegseth stumbled. “President Trump, as people have seen, has a unique relationship with a lot of world leaders, where he can get things done that other presidents — certainly [former President] JoeBiden — never could have. And through direct conversations or indirect, through him one-to-one, or through his cabinet, messages definitely can be delivered.”
We’ll see. I have zero faith that Trump will stand up to Putin on anything.
Russia has provided intelligence to Iran during the U.S.-Israeli war, including satellite imagery showing the locations of warships and military personnel, according to U.S. officials.
The information sharing could complicate relations between the United States and Russia, given that President Trump has often taken a more conciliatory stance toward Moscow than his predecessors.
Persian cat by Carolee Vitaletti
But some of the officials played down the partnership, saying Russia has long provided similar intelligence to Iran. And it is not clear how much Tehran has been able to use the new intelligence, if at all. Iran has advanced missiles, but they lag far behind Russia’s and it is not clear Iran could use the intelligence to target a ship.
Furthermore, given the immense pressure of the combined U.S.-Israeli assault, which began last Saturday, Iran’s ability to launch missiles has been degraded, officials said.
But officials confirmed that Russia has provided updated intelligence on the position of U.S. assets since the beginning of the war, information meant to help Iran target the assets.
So far Iranian forces have not hit any U.S. warships, but they have struck at U.S. military bases, killing six service members in Kuwait and damaging facilities in Bahrain. Iranian drones have also struck a building housing the C.I.A. station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, though no one was injured in that attack, officials said.
I guess we’ll eventually find out how effective Russia’s help is and whether Trump will do anything about it.
Two more stories that address possible outcomes of the Iran “war.”
A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment, a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials sayhas “only just begun.”
The findings, confirmed to The Washington Post by three people familiar with the report’s contents, raise doubts about President Donald Trump’s declared plan to “clean out” Iran’s leadership structure and install a ruler of his choosing.
The report, completed about a week before the United States and Israel initiated the war on Feb. 28, outlined succession scenarios stemming from either a narrowly tailored campaign against Iran’s leaders or a broader assault against its leadership and government institutions, the people familiar with its findings said. In both cases, the intelligence concluded that Iran’s clerical and military establishment would respond to the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by following protocols designed to preserve continuity of power, these people said.
The prospect of Iran’s fragmented opposition taking control of the country was described as “unlikely,” said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified report.
On the other hand, maybe this is all just a distraction from the Epstein files. Read more with the gift link.
President Trump likes to assert that he has accomplished things no other president has. With the opening of his military assault against Iran, he has achieved another distinction: He is the first president in the era of modern polling to take the United States to war without the support of the public.
Traditionally, Americans stand behind their president when he first orders troops into battle, generally sticking with him unless it drags on, casualties mount and victory seems increasingly elusive. With Mr. Trump’s war against Iran, the public has skipped the rally-around-the-president phase this time.
Support for his ferocious bombardment of Iran has ranged from 27 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll to 41 percent in a CNN survey, far below the level of public backing that Mr. Trump’s predecessors initially enjoyed when they used force overseas. Given that wars tend to grow less popular over time, the initial negative response portends political challenges for Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans the longer the fighting continues.
The opposition is revealing about this particular moment in American history. A country already tired of decades of combat in the Middle East has shown little appetite for yet another adventure abroad. And the deep polarization of American politics only makes it harder to build support across lines. Even some Americans sympathetic to the goal of toppling the repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Tehran find it difficult to embrace Mr. Trump as commander in chief.
Moreover, unlike his predecessors, Mr. Trump has not done much to bring the public along, forgoing the usual tools of his office to explain to Americans what he is doing, why he is doing it and how it will end. Instead, he and his administration have offered contradictory accounts of what drove this decision and what victory would look like.
“As he has in many other areas, President Trump is pioneering a new approach,” said Peter D. Feaver, a national security aide under President George W. Bush during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “He has enjoyed considerable success in doing other things that previous presidents thought couldn’t or shouldn’t be done, but this is one of the biggest political gambles he has taken.”
The consequences are enormous for Mr. Trump’s presidency, for the success of the war and for the upcoming midterm elections, with Republicans already facing ominous signs that they could lose one if not both houses of Congress. The war power votes in the Senate and the House this week, in which Republicans backed Mr. Trump, may be featured in Democratic campaign ads this fall.
Use the gift link to read the rest.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What do you think? What else is on your mind?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Kahn said he was set to present a poster, give a talk and chair a session at the ADA Scientific Sessions meeting, which runs from Friday until Monday — but has since been informed by the scientific society’s leaders that he has been relieved of those duties.
On what could happen next:
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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