Trump's real bunker buster is yet to explode
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This under-the-radar Supreme Court case could upend Trump's plans
This view is only strengthened when Americans see most of the justices of the court dividing along ideological lines on decisions related to some of the most hot-button issues the court handles. Those include reproductive rights, voting rights, corporate power, environmental protection, student loan policy, worker rights and LGBTQ+ rights.
But there is one recent decision where the court was unanimous in its ruling, perhaps because its holding should not be controversial: National Rifle Association v. Vullo. In that 2024 case, the court said that it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment’s free speech provisions for government to force people to speak and act in ways that are aligned with its policies.
The second Trump administration has tried to wield executive branch power in ways that appear to punish or suppress speech and opposition to administration policy priorities. Many of those attempts have been legally challenged and will likely make their way to the Supreme Court.
The somewhat under-the-radar – yet incredibly important – decision in National Rifle Association v. Vullo is likely to figure prominently in Supreme Court rulings in a slew of those cases in the coming months and years, including those involving law firms, universities and the Public Broadcasting Service.
That’s because, in my view as a legal scholar, they are all First Amendment cases.
Why the NRA sued a New York state official
In May 2024, in an opinion written by reliably liberal Sonia Sotomayor, a unanimous court ruled that the efforts of New York state government officials to punish companies doing business with the NRA constituted clear violations of the First Amendment.
Following its own precedent from the 1960s, Bantam Books v. Sullivan, the court found that government officials “cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”
Many of the current targets of the Trump administration’s actions have claimed similar suppression of their First Amendment rights by the government. They have fought back, filing lawsuits that often cite the National Rifle Association v. Vullo decision in their efforts.
To date, the most egregious examples of actions that violate the principles announced by the court – the executive orders against law firms – have largely been halted in the lower courts, with those decisions often citing what’s now known as the Vullo decision.
While these cases may still be working their way through the lower courts, it is likely that the Supreme Court will ultimately consider legal challenges to the Trump administration’s efforts in a range of areas.
These would include the executive orders against law firms, attempts to cut government grants and research funding from universities, potential moves to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status, and regulatory actions punishing media companies for what the White House believes to be unfavorable coverage.
The court could also hear disputes over the government terminating contracts with a family of companies that provides satellite and communications support to the U.S. government generally and the military in particular.
Despite the variety of organizations and government actions involved in these lawsuits, they all can be seen as struggles over free speech and expression, like Vullo.
Whether it is private law firms, multinational corporations, universities or members of the media, all have one thing in common: They have all been targeted by the Trump administration for the same reason – they are engaged in actions or speech that is disfavored by President Donald Trump.
Protecting speech, regardless of politics
The NRA, an often-controversial gun-rights advocacy organization, was the plaintiff in the Vullo decision.
But just because the groups that have been targeted by the Trump administration are across the political divide from the NRA does not mean the outcome in decisions relying on the court’s opinion will be different. In fact, these groups can rely on the same arguments advanced by the NRA, and are, I believe, likely to win.
Vullo isn’t the only decision on which the court can rely when considering challenges to the Trump administration’s efforts targeting these groups.
In the wake of World War II, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson took a leave from the court and served as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Prosecuting them for their atrocities, Jackson saw how the Nuremberg defendants wielded government authority to punish enemies who resisted their rise and later opposed their rule.
Once he returned to the court, Jackson wrote the majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, where the court found that students who refused to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school could not be expelled.
Jackson’s opinion is a forceful rejection of government attempts to control what people say: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
If some of the cases testing the state’s power to force fidelity to the executive branch reach the Supreme Court, the cases could offer the justices the opportunity to, once again, speak with one voice as they did in NRA v. Vullo, to demonstrate it can be evenhanded and will not play politics with the First Amendment.
Ray Brescia, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Albany Law School
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Three scenarios that could unfold after Trump drags U.S. into war with Iran
These strikes have to be viewed as part of an overall continuum that began with the Gaza war following Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and then continued with Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah (the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon) and the fall of the Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria.
Iran has never been weaker than it is now. And when Trump said it may take two weeks for him to decide whether to bomb Iran, the Israelis likely pushed him to act sooner.
We can assume there was a lot of Israeli pressure on Trump to use the massive ordnance penetrators, the 30,000-pound (13,600-kilogram) “bunker buster” bombs that only the US can deploy with its B2 bombers.
Now that Trump has taken the significant step of entering the US in yet another Middle East war, where could things go from here? There are a few possible scenarios.
1. Iran strikes back
The Iranians know they don’t have the strength to take on the US, and that the Americans can do enormous damage to their country and even put the Iranian regime’s stability at risk.
This is always the prime consideration of the clerical regime led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – everything else is subordinate to that.
To gauge Iran’s possible reaction, we can look at the how it responded to the first Trump administration’s assassination of the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, in January 2020.
Iran said there would be a major reaction, but all it did was launch a barrage of missiles at two American bases in Iraq, which caused no US fatalities and very little damage. After that token retaliation, Iran said the matter was closed.
Iran’s reaction to the new US strikes will likely be along these lines. It probably won’t want to get into a tit-for-tat with the US by launching attacks against American facilities in the region. Trump has promised to respond with force:
Iran, a bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.
It’s also unclear how long Iran will be able to prosecute this war. This depends largely on how many ballistic missiles and launchers it has left.
There are various estimates as to how many ballistic missiles Iran may have remaining in its stockpiles. It was believed to have about 2,000 missiles capable of reaching Israel at the start of the war. Some estimates say Iran has fired 700 of them; others say around 400. Whatever the number is, its stockpiles are dwindling quickly.
Israel has also destroyed about a third of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers. If Israel is able to destroy all of them, Iran would have very limited ability to fight back.
2. Iran backs down
Before the US got involved in the conflict, Iran said it was prepared to negotiate, but it wouldn’t do so while Israel was still attacking.
So, one scenario is that some sort of compromise can now be worked out, in which Israel announces a ceasefire and Iran and the US agree to resume negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program.
The big problem is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he doesn’t trust the negotiating process and he doesn’t want to stop Israel’s military actions until all of Iran’s nuclear facilities have been completely destroyed. He’s also been bombing Iran’s oil terminals and gas facilities to put even more pressure on the regime.
But the regime has shown itself to be incredibly determined not to lose face. It was under great pressure at different times during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and never considered surrendering until a US missile mistakenly took down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 people.
Iran then agreed to a UN-brokered ceasefire. But the Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years, causing an estimated one million deaths. And when the then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, agreed to the ceasefire, he said it was “worse than drinking poison”.
Given the state of Iran’s military capabilities, Khamenei, the current supreme leader, might surrender simply to try to preserve the regime. But this would be quite a climbdown as far as he’s concerned, and he has been very obstinate in the past.
The regime is very unpopular, but the Iranian people, in my experience, are strongly patriotic – loyal to their country, if not the regime. Though it’s difficult to gauge opinion in a country of 90 million people, a lot of Iranians would not want to be ordered to do anything by the US or Israel, and would rather fight on.
Netanyahu has said he wants to create the conditions for the Iranian people to rise up against the regime.
But it’s worth bearing in mind that the opposite of autocracy is not necessarily democracy. It could possibly be chaos. Iran has a number of different ethnic groups and there may be huge disagreements over what should take the place of the clerical regime, were it to fall.
At this stage, the regime will probably be able to hold together. And even if Khameini were to die suddenly, the regime will likely be able to quickly replace him.
Though we don’t know his probable successor, the regime has had plenty of time to plan for this. Those in senior positions will also know that a post-Khamenei succession struggle really would put the regime at risk.
3. The US engagement is limited
According to the new polling by The Economist and YouGov, released on June 17, 60% of Americans were opposed to joining the conflict between Israel and Iran, with just 16% in favour. Among Republicans, 53% opposed military action.
So, these strikes were not an obviously popular move among Americans at this stage. However, if this is an isolated event and succeeds in bringing a swift end to the war, Trump will probably be applauded by a majority of Americans.
If the US has to go back with more bombers – or there are serious attacks on US interests in the region – there could be more adverse reactions among Americans.
Another question is whether Iran’s 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium have been destroyed in the US attack.
If it hasn’t been destroyed, and depending how much damage has been done to its centrifuges, Iran may be able to reconstruct its nuclear program relatively quickly. And it could have more incentive to further enrich this uranium to 90% purity, or weapons-grade level, to build a nuclear device.
Ian Parmeter, Research Scholar, Middle East Studies, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This sickening disgrace showcased all that is vile about Trump
On June 19, 1865, the Union’s Major General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived in the city of Galveston, Texas, which sits hard on the Gulf of Mexico. It was now nearly two and a half years since President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Upon arriving in this port city, Major General Granger let the population there know the Civil War had ended two months earlier, the North had won, and enslaved African Americans there were officially, and FINALLY free. Only months later, the 13th Amendment was ratified, officially abolishing slavery everywhere in America.
Can you imagine what this moment must have been like? It can be argued this is the most significant day in this country’s erratic history.
Why, even Donald Trump himself briefly stumbled into this realization when he said this in 2017, just months after his improbable victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election:
“Melania and I send our warmest greetings to all those celebrating Juneteenth, a historic day recognizing the end of slavery.”
Even if there’s no way in the world Trump actually wrote that statement, it was the thought that counted. Even if the guy who relentlessly pilloried Barack Obama for years with his disgusting, racist birther blather meant none of what he officially put on the record that day, it was the right thing to do.
Predictably, just two months later, the reckless racist was back on the road to hate when he couldn’t bring himself to say a bad word about the white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, that disgraced America and resulted in the terrible murder of Heather Heyer, along with horrific injuries to dozens of other innocent Americans who were protesting against the vulgar event.
This was who Trump really was. This was the guy who has had countless endorsements from the KKK, and by Thursday evening had endured enough of all these Juneteenth celebrations. So he went out with this reprehensible, grammatically challenged blast. It would be his only public proclamation on Juneteenth, 2025:
This was classic Trump taking a deep, noxious breath and blowing hot air into his nuclear-powered dog whistle.
He never mentioned Juneteenth once on Thursday, but made sure his racist base knew exactly what he thought of the day. Now into a second term that he will do everything to ensure is an endless one, there is no reason to play it cute any longer as he had very briefly in 2017.
And, hey, that’s a real shame for a guy who spends hours in front of a mirror each morning taping a dead ferret to his head, while liberally slathering orange mud on his graying face just to look pretty …
King Crud wanted everybody to know last night that he was back on the throne breaking wind, and all protocols of decency.
This was the dirty, old man who has repeatedly called Democrats “scum” and earlier this week was standing in his weird way on the White House lawn proudly fondling a flag poll somebody else erected for him.
“It’s such a beautiful pole,” he gushed … (Tell us you have issues down there, without actually telling us you have issues down there, sport …)
This was the low-energy loser who harrumphed out of the G7 meetings Monday night because he can no longer even pretend to be a valuable contributor. He needs his naps, and a regular diaper change.
This is the guy who has proven time and again he has absolutely no ability, nor talent, to govern, but does have an endless capacity to hate. He has never passed any meaningful legislation that helps most Americans, but lately is pushing his “big, beautiful” bill that will coddle and burp the billionaires who stuff his bottomless pockets, while beating the working class into submission.
And even none of that really matters to Trump just as long as he can projectile vomit lawless executive orders, but most important, remind us all of his singular political talent: understanding his party’s endless capacity to hate.
“They’re eating our dogs and cats!!!!”
Back when I was but a cub reporter breaking into journalism, I was told by a growling editor to just “write what I know.” It was good advice, and why in looking back on a lot of my writings in the past decade, I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the subject of race.
I view the subject through the lens of a white man now well into my 60s, who has seen a few things. After a lifetime of living pretty well, I know how good I’ve had it. Like the odious Trump, I have never experienced life on the other side, but I am an expert on what goes on on this side.
I have seen casual and overt racism from white people I grew up with, and others I came to know through the years. It turned my stomach, but too often I let it go, until Trump came along in 2015, and I decided it was time to publicly stand up and put it down wherever I see it.
I have lost many old friends, and gained many new ones, whose heart and pride have had a profound effect on me.
So here is what I know as a white man: Racism continues to be America’s most difficult issue to grapple with, and the reprehensible Donald Trump exploits the volatility and the heat that comes with it to split us in two.
He does this because he is a damn bigot.
(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)