Trump reveals exit strategy as bombshells continue to drop
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
The one thing missing from Trump's Iran war that doomed every unpopular war before it
By Charles Walldorf, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest University.
It’s clear that regime change is among the biggest objectives of the U.S. war in Iran.
“I have to be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader, President Donald Trump said on March 5, 2026.
Trump has also said he might put U.S. boots on the ground to get the job done.
Trump now joins a long list of modern U.S. presidents – from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – who started wars to either overthrow hostile regimes or support embattled friendly governments abroad.
For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.
A recent CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans oppose the war — a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.
As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.
Two historical examples
In the 1930s and 40s, a widely accepted – and largely true – story about the dangers of fascism spreading and democracies falling galvanized national support in the United States to enter and then take on the high costs of fighting in World War II.
Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88 percent support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70 percent support in 2003.
With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.
No anti-Iran narrative
Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?
Two things.
First, grand-purpose narratives are rooted in major geopolitical gains by a rival regime — the danger to the U.S. For the anti-fascism narrative, those events were German troops plowing across Europe and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the anti-terrorism narrative, it was planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.
Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55 percent of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44 percent, is down from 48 percent in July 2025.
By contrast, 64 percent of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.
The poll numbers on Iran aren’t surprising. Iran is far from a geopolitical menace to the United States today. To the contrary, it’s been in geopolitical retreat in the Middle East in recent years.
In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged — “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim — during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.
And in recent years, Tehran has lost a major ally in Syria and witnessed its proxy network all but collapse. Iran has also faced crippling economic conditions and historic protests at home.
As the polls show, none of that has sparked a grand-purpose narrative.
Missing a good story
The second missing factor for narrative formation today is any strong messaging from the White House.
In the months prior to World War II, Roosevelt used his position of authority as president to give speech after speech, setting the context of the traumatic events of the 1930s, explaining the dangers at hand and outlining a course going forward. Though less truthful in its content, Bush did the same for nearly two years before the Iraq War.
Trump did almost none of this storytelling leading up to the Iran war. Five days before the war started, the president devoted three minutes to Iran in a nearly two-hour State of the Union Address.
Prior to that, he made a comment here and there to the press about Iran, but no storytelling preparing the nation for war. Likewise, since the war began, the administration’s stated reasons for military action keep shifting.
No wonder 54 percent of Americans polled disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran and 60 percent of Americans say Trump has no clear plan for Iran. Also, 60 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of foreign policy in general.
By comparison, Americans approved of Bush’s handling of foreign policy by 63 percent in early 2003.
Absent a cohesive, unifying story, it’s also no surprise there is lots of political fracturing today.
Partisan divides run deep — Democrats and independent voters strongly oppose the war. But Trump’s MAGA coalition is cracking too, with people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene sharply criticizing the war.
The way out
If he opts for it, there is an off-ramp for Trump from the Iran war. It’s one he knows well.
When U.S. leaders get caught up in costly regime change wars that outrun national support, they tend to back down, often with far fewer political costs than if they’d continued their unpopular war.
When the disaster referred to as Black Hawk Down hit in Somalia in 1993, killing 18 U.S. Marines, President Bill Clinton opted to end the mission to topple the warlords that ruled the country. Troops came home six months later.
Likewise, after the Benghazi attack killed four Americans in Libya in 2012, Obama pulled out all U.S. personnel working in Libya on nation-building operations.
And just last year, when Trump realized that U.S. ground troops would be necessary to topple the Houthi militant group in Yemen, he negotiated a ceasefire and ended his air war in that country with no significant political fallout.
With Trump’s Iran war, gas prices keep rising, more soldiers are likely to die, and stocks are highly volatile.
Backing down makes a lot of sense. History confirms that.
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Iran called Trump's bluff — and somehow Putin won
Donald Trump suddenly popped on TV screens late Monday, giving his most extensive remarks on the war in Iran and taking questions from the press.
Trump had previously given no public speech to the American people upon the initiation of this war — unlike every American president taking the country to war in the past. His communication to the American public was mostly in the form of videos or speaking by phone to select reporters, offering wildly shifting rationales for the war and its goals.
On Monday, however, he finally came before the White House press corps and repeated what he’d said earlier in the day to CBS, that the war — which he now dubbed a mere “excursion” — is “very complete.” But he also said it would go on, even though it would end “soon,” and said that Pete Hegseth, who earlier said the war is “just the beginning,” is correct, even though Trump himself said that it’s “complete.”
What?
He’s trying to have it all ways in a war that had no planning or an endgame.
The crazy presser perhaps is explained by two things that happened in the hours before it: Trump spoke at length to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Trump saw oil prices surge to $120 a barrel on Sunday, tanking markets around the world and in the U.S. on Monday morning.
Let’s take the latter first. We learned from the tariff upheaval that Trump cannot stomach the markets crashing and particularly the bond market starting to teeter. It’s the only thing that stops him. Corporate America and his billionaire friends and GOP donors wind up shrieking. And average Americans — in this case looking at the price of gasoline — become very attuned to the economy and high prices.
Trump’s earlier statement in the day to CBS, while the markets were open, that the war is “very complete” was meant to calm the markets.
“I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” Trump told CBS. “They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force ... Wrapping up is all in my mind.”
And the intended effect worked. The markets began to rebound as the price of oil came down. It actually had been coming down a bit from earlier when Trump promised insurance and military escorts for companies. None of that may actually happen. It’s risky for American military vessels to escort ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which has essentially been brought to a standstill, stranding 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. But the market operates on hope and fear.
Trump knows that. The real economy operates on facts — real data as well as on experiences on the ground by Americans in their jobs and in their consumer spending — but the market operates on hope and fear until that real economy catches up. The market can be temporarily lifted, and Trump lent it a helping hand.
But later, in the presser, after the markets had closed, Trump gave much more mixed signals — the New York Times called it a “zigzag” — saying the war may go on for a while. He even responded to a question about Hegseth, saying it’s “just the beginning” by saying that “both” could be true.
Clearly, Trump still wanted to convey that he had massive leverage over Iran, and that the bombing will continue — which it has. That’s because, in essence, this was all a capitulation to the Iranian regime, which knew the US wouldn’t have the stomach to go on for long.
Trump had only on Friday called for an “unconditional surrender” from Iran and said he’d need a say in who would be its leader, promoting his most extensive thoughts on regime change yet. And Trump absolutely rejected the idea that the son of the former Supreme Leader could be the new Supreme Leader.
But Iran indeed installed as Supreme Leader the son of 86-year-old Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a U.S. strike along with a few dozen other leaders, some of whom were viewed as more moderate by U.S. intelligence and as leaders with whom the U.S. could work. As national security analyst Joe Cirincione, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me on my SiriusXM program yesterday, that strike was a strategic blunder — spurred on by Israel — as the U.S. now had no top leaders with whom it could negotiate.
The son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is much more hardline than his father and is only 56 years old. So Trump killed the old man who could likely have been replaced when he died by one among several moderates — all of whom Trump also killed — and now the hardline, young son will be there for a long time.
Iran’s regime defied Trump’s demand — there would be no surrender — and they chose their more extreme leader. And then the markets tanked as oil was cut off. And Trump caved.
So Trump’s bluster at the presser yesterday was his way of trying to make Iran’s brutal government feel afraid of him. But why should they feel afraid? He’d, after all, just melted away. Trump also completely sidestepped a question from a reporter about how the Iranian people — the vast majority of whom support democracy — could feel betrayed by him? Trump had promised them he’d save them, only to now cave and hand them over to a new ayatollah.
Trump’s move to declare victory wasn’t, however, just a response to the market and the billionaire overlords. He’d had a long conversation with Putin earlier in the day as well, a call that Putin initiated, according to reports in the media. We learned in recent days that Putin was continuing to supply Iran with intelligence, which is outrageous since Iran was targeting American soldiers using intelligence from Russia. And yet, both Trump and Hegseth dismissed that, as usual tiptoeing around Putin. And now Trump had a long conversation with Putin.
The conservation, which Trump said was a “good” one, is pretty much shrouded in mystery. But we can put together how it went. Putin had earlier said that the attack would trigger an oil crisis and said oil transport would stop in the Strait of Hormuz. He was, of course, right.
Putin also said that Russia — whose economy is collapsing under sanctions but which is the second-largest oil exporter in the world and has the biggest reserve of natural gas — was happy to once again sell Europe its oil and gas. Europe had stopped importing Russian energy after the Ukraine invasion began.
Putin wanted a long-term deal again. And Trump, we’ve learned, is now considering pulling back on oil sanctions against Russia. He’d already announced a few days ago that he was allowing India to buy oil from Russia, dropping the threatened tariffs if India bought Russian oil, because of the shortage of oil coming from the Gulf.
“We’re also waiving certain oil-related sanctions to reduce prices,” Trump said at the presser yesterday. “So we have sanctions on some countries. We’re going to take those sanctions off until this straightens out.”
So Trump capitulated not only to Iran but to Russia.
Putin now had more leverage on Trump, able to help Trump out in the oil crisis he created. Putin is getting Trump to actually help sell Russian oil, and lift Putin’s devastated economy. The invasion of Ukraine be damned.
Trump may be trying to claim the U.S. has won, but the only winners so far are Putin and, to the extent that they survive even if their military capability is damaged for now, the Iranian regime.
The Iranian people are still living under a horrific, murderous theocracy. Thousands have been killed in Iran and the region, including hundreds of Iranian children killed in a school that analysts have determined was caused by an American Tomahawk missile. Seven American service members lost their lives. And the American people are paying higher gas prices, as the oil shock will last a while.
The Gulf nations suffered casualties because the U.S. didn’t plan for this war, mindbogglingly thinking the war would be over in days and that Iran wouldn’t attack U.S. assets in the Gulf states, while thousands of Americans and people from other countries were stranded in the war zone.
And U.S. credibility took another dive, as Trump weakens this country’s standing in the world by the day.
- Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.
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This Trump move pushed us to the brink — but there's still a way to put things right
As we reach the 12th day of the war in Iran — with death and destruction rippling throughout the Middle East — it’s important to bear in mind where the real failure of this lies.
So far, at least 2,000 people have been killed, including 175 Iranian schoolchildren, and seven American service members. At least 140 U.S. service members have been wounded, several critically. The final tallies on both sides will almost certainly be far higher.
Soaring oil and gas prices in the U.S. are inevitably hitting the poor and working class much harder than the affluent.
We’re spending huge resources on this war — roughly $1 billion per day, or $41,666,667 per hour, $11,574 per second.
These are resources that could be better spent improving the lives of the American people.
Americans need health care. Affordable housing. Child care and elder care. Better schools. We want our basic needs met. But the government has said we “can’t afford” these things.
Yet supposedly we can afford nearly $1 trillion for the Pentagon. Trump now says the Pentagon needs $500 billion more.
The tragic failure at the center of this devastation is not that most Americans have succumbed to war fever. To the contrary, poll after poll shows that most Americans do not support this war.
In fact, this is the first war America has entered in modern times without a majority in support.
The real failure is that the richest and most powerful nation in the world — the nation that has led the world since World War II and that established the postwar international order emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law — is now being led by a rogue president who rejects all these values.
One man has decided for himself to make this war. One lone person has initiated this mayhem without gaining Congress’s approval, without getting the approval of allies, without even articulating a clear reason for it.
The lone person who sits in the Oval Office has no endgame for this war, hasn’t given a consistent answer for what “victory” will require, and doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing.
One single individual is now wreaking havoc — lives lost, energy prices soaring, our treasury being emptied, our own needs overlooked, and potential future terrorism unleashed on this and other lands for years to come.
This war marks an overwhelming failure of American democracy. It is ultimately our failure.
What can we do now?
On March 28 — two weeks from this coming Saturday — we march across America in the largest demonstration in the nation’s history.
In coming weeks and months, we harden our elections systems so they cannot be overridden by the despot in the White House.
In November, we turn out the largest numbers ever recorded for a midterm election, to take back leadership of Congress from those who have enabled this rogue president.
Meanwhile, we continue to defend our communities, protect our immigrant friends and neighbors from state violence, and defend our universities and schools, our museums and libraries, and our media and newspapers from state despotism.
The best way for us to respond to the devastation of this war, in other words, is to strengthen the mechanisms that should never have allowed it to occur in the first place.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump may be trying to provoke an attack on American soil
We got more lies on Tuesday morning from the Pentagon press briefing. They’re now up to 17 different rationalizations for the attack on Iran, none of which makes sense.
To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider what happened in Minab, Iran.
A Tomahawk cruise missile, an American weapon, a weapon that Iran doesn’t own and can’t fire, struck a girls’ elementary school. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, most of them little girls who showed up that morning to learn to read.
And Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran did it. He lied. About dead children. Without blinking. And his crew backed him up, even knowing it was a lie.
And now the corporate media will spend two days on this and then move on to whatever shiny object the White House throws next. That isn’t an aberration: it’s the GOP’s entire strategy. This is who they are and have been since Reagan pioneered the scam: a PR machine front for an iron-fisted oligarchy.
I’ve been studying authoritarian movements for 40 years, including in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. I’ve written about how Hitler rose to power, how Mussolini consolidated his grip on Italy, how the Confederates took over the American South, how strongmen from Budapest to Brasília have used the same playbook again and again.
And the first page of that fascist and neofascist playbook is always the same: “Destroy the concept of shared truth.”
Not any particular truth. Not “this lie” or “that lie.” The concept of truth itself. Make people so exhausted, so confused, so beaten down by the constant barrage of contradictions, lies, and naked bulls--- that they give up trying to figure out what’s real. Make cynicism feel like wisdom and encourage your “influencers” to make it cool. Make “nobody knows anything” feel like a reasonable way to understand what’s happening.
Because once you’ve done that, once you’ve convinced enough people that truth is just whatever you say no matter how outrageous or transparently false it is, you can do pretty much anything.
- You can bomb a school full of little girls and blame the victims.
- You can try to rig an election and, when you lose, call it stolen from you.
- You can watch a million Americans die and say the virus is just going to disappear.
- You can claim that tax cuts for billionaires will help average working-class people.
- You can say that increasing poisons in the air and on our crops will Make America Healthy Again.
- You can argue that destroying unions will increase working people’s standard of living.
- You can claim that taking people’s healthcare away “encourages individual initiative” and “independence.”
Trump didn’t invent this. But my G-d, has he ever perfected it.
Trump also didn’t build this lie machine all by himself. Most of it was built for him, over a period of 50 years, with billions of dollars, by morbidly rich people who never appear on television and never have to answer for any of it.
In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that became the blueprint for the takeover of America by the richest men in the country. Powell told the business community that they were losing America, that universities, the press, and the courts were all turning against “free enterprise,” and that if corporations didn’t fight back systematically and aggressively, capitalism itself was at risk.
What followed was one of the most consequential 50-year projects in American political history, every bit as nation-changing and dangerous as the Confederate movement of the 1840s.
- Think tanks were funded to produce “alternative” academic research that would always reach the “right” conclusions.
- Conservative media was built from the ground up, from 1,500 AM talk radio stations to Fox “News” to the rightwing takeover of social media, all to create an information ecosystem where Republican voters would never have to encounter an uncomfortable fact.
- Public schools and Civics classes were defunded and attacked, because an educated citizenry asks too many questions.
- Local newspapers, the institutions that actually hold local power accountable, were starved out of existence.
Charles and David Koch alone spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding distrust in climate science, in government, in the very idea that collective action could solve collective problems. And they were just the tip of a massive iceberg.
This wasn’t an accident; it was a strategy.
And that strategy had one ultimate goal: to create a population of Americans so skeptical of institutions, so distrustful of expertise, so certain that everyone is lying all the time, that they’d be willing to believe anything.
Donald Trump didn’t create those people. They were created for him by these cynical billionaires.
And that means that removing Trump from power won’t dismantle the machine. Unless it’s defeated along with Trump, it’ll just produce another Trump, a smarter one, one who doesn’t make his lies and corruption quite so obvious.
The numbers around this project are staggering. Thirty thousand naked lies or misleading statements Donald Trump made during his first term alone. The Washington Post counted them: over 30,000.
That’s a man who woke up every single morning with the intention of deceiving the American people. That isn’t occasional dishonesty or spin: it’s a psychopathy — pathological lying — deployed as a governing strategy.
And it worked for Trump, just like it worked for Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán before him.
- He told people that Barack Obama, a man who released his birth certificate, a man whose Hawaiian birth was verified by state officials, a man who graduated from Harvard Law, was secretly a Kenyan. Millions of people believed it then and millions still do to this day.
- He told people three million illegal ballots were cast against him in 2016 and that he won in 2020. While repeated investigations by reporters, federal agencies, and even courts (including the Supreme Court) found no evidence, he keeps saying it anyway.
- He told people Covid would disappear. “One day, like a miracle, it’ll just go away.” Over a half-million Americans are in the ground because of the lies Trump told during those early critical months when action could’ve saved lives.
- And then he told us all the biggest lie of all, the lie that almost ended the American experiment with democracy. When he lost in 2020 — lost fairly, lost decisively, lost in a contest that his own Attorney General, his own Homeland Security officials, his own judges said was legitimate — Donald Trump told his followers the election had been stolen.
Sixty-plus lawsuits, thrown out by every court that heard them. Even his own people told him the fraud claims weren’t true.
Nonetheless, he lied about it anyway. Louder. On repeat. For months.
And on January 6th, 2021, his mob stormed the United States Capitol, our Capitol, the symbol of 250 years of democratic governance, because this twisted man had spent months pouring gasoline on their rage and then lit the match at a rally a few blocks away.
People died. Police officers were beaten and four of them died. Members of Congress hid under their desks. And Donald Trump giddily watched it on television and did nothing for hours.
That’s who’s running the United States of America right now.
His supporters will tell you, as they always tell you, “that was then.” Move on. Stop living in the past. But here’s the thing: he never stopped.
- Back in power, he’s now claiming inflation was at record levels when he took office. It wasn’t.
- He’s claiming gas prices have dropped below two dollars in some states. They haven’t.
- He says climate change is a hoax. It’s not.
- He’s reviving the zombie lie that undocumented immigrants vote in American elections, a claim that multiple rigorous studies (including by the Heritage Foundation) have demolished but Republicans keep reciting, because it serves the GOP’s purpose of making Americans distrust their own elections.
- He’s pushing discredited claims linking vaccines to autism. He’s the President of the United States and he’s telling parents not to trust medicines that have saved millions of lives, based on a sham study that was retracted decades ago because the author fabricated the data.
- He’s claiming America pays for nearly the entire NATO alliance. We don’t. We pay a significant share, but 29 other nations contribute. This isn’t a matter of interpretation; it’s arithmetic.
These aren’t gaffes or misstatements. They’re deliberate lies. Each one chips away at some aspect of American life and governance, at trust in elections, trust in science, trust in institutions, trust in the basic idea that we can all look at the same facts and reach the same conclusions.
That’s the goal of these billionaires who fund the GOP and put Trump into office. And their buddy, Vladimir Putin, whose bots so heavily populate our social media. It’s always been their goal. And it was their goal long before Donald Trump came down that escalator.
And then there are Trump’s toadies and lickspittles, the hangers-on. Let’s not let the enablers off the hook, because this machine doesn’t even remotely run on Trump alone.
Pete Hegseth, an alleged alcoholic wife-beater whose own mother called him “an abuser of women” who, she wrote, “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” was handed the most powerful military in human history despite having no meaningful qualifications for the job. He was confirmed by Republicans in the Senate in what future historians will call one of the greatest acts of institutional cowardice in American history.
This is the man who stood in front of cameras after Minab and said Iran was the only side targeting civilians. One hundred and sixty dead children. Footage of an American Tomahawk missile. And Pete Hegseth looked America in the eye and lied.
Hegseth, Vance, Noem, Bondi, Miller, Vought, et al, aren’t confused or mistaken. They absolutely know what they’re doing and what lies they’re telling. And they’re counting on enough of us being too tired, too overwhelmed, too beaten down by 50 years of relentless Republican dishonesty to push back.
Don’t be.
Democracy isn’t a building. It’s not a flag or even a Constitution, as important as that document is. Democracy is a shared agreement, an agreement that we’ll resolve our differences through votes and not violence, that we’ll be governed by facts and not whoever yells the loudest, that when we disagree about what happened we can at least look at the evidence together.
That agreement didn’t just happen into existence; it took over three centuries to build. It was, as I write in The Hidden History of American Democracy, built on the Enlightenment and Native American idea that reason matters, that evidence is meaningful, that human beings are capable of governing themselves when they’re told the truth and well-informed.
This 50-year project I’m describing has been a direct assault on that very idea of self-governance. Defund the schools. Kill the local press. Teach people that experts are “elitists,” science is opinion, and government is always the enemy. Then stand back and watch what happens to a democracy that’s been hollowed out from the inside.
Donald Trump is what happens. CBS is what happens. An unprovoked war against Iran is what happens.
Our nation’s Founders and the Framers of the Constitution understood this. They knew that a free press and an educated citizenry aren’t luxuries: they’re the load-bearing walls of the republic. Knock them out and the whole thing comes down.
We’ve been watching someone kick at them for 50 years. Trump is just the most recent, least sophisticated, and grossest wrecking ball they finally decided to throw at us.
And 160 children in Minab are dead, and the men responsible are pointing their fingers at the country they bombed and saying, “Iran did it.”
Trump is basically inviting Iranian partisans to attack America with the ferocity and style of 9/11, hoping it’ll provoke a “rally around the president” moment like Bush got and the Reichstag Fire did.
As fascism expert Timothy Snyder writes:
“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming Congressional elections.”
This is what it looks like when a democracy is in genuine danger.
The rightwing lie machine was built to make you feel like nothing you do matters. Like it’s all just too big. Like you’re way too small. Like the liars always win, so, “Why bother?”
That’s both the first and the last lie they need you to believe.
Don’t.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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Trump may survive Epstein — but this act of contempt will finally bring him down
We at least know now that the fuse for the Trump administration's destruction is lit and burning fast.
Yes, the Epstein Files loom larger almost by the day, with allegations that Donald Trump attacked a 13-year-old girl, reporting on Epstein's possible murder and its cover-up, and new stories about Epstein's ranch in New Mexico and potential deaths.
But as we have seen time and again, there seems to be no "scandal" big enough to bring Trump down. The president’s corruption and abuse of women are baked in at this point. (He was found civilly liable for sexual abuse, remember, survived, and returned to office.)
The even bigger threat to Trump, the one that will unleash the necessary predicate to more devastating Epstein revelations, will come from a slumping economy and the failure to lay down the single most necessary element to starting a war, in this case against Iran — proving with evidence the underlying reason to attack and sustain American deaths and economic suffering.
This administration might never recover.
We see Trump, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and the other prominent alleged abuser of women, the never-to-be-damned-enough Secretary of "War," Peter Hegseth, all telling us Iran was "a week away" from developing a nuclear weapon and attacking the United States.
Fine. Prove it.
Twenty years ago, on the road to disastrous war in Iraq, even though they spread misinformation throughout the media, the Bush administration at least made the effort, trying to prove Iraq had a WMD program. At least they respected the American people enough to show us the sadly hung-out-to-dry Colin Powell stumbling along in testimony to the United Nations, serving to (sort of) rally his country to war.
Not Trump.
"Take our word for it," is the best Leavitt can offer:
"That's not the first time the president has said that he chose to launch Operation Epic Fury because he felt as though Iran was going to strike the United States and our assets.
"And he has said, was not going to sit back and allow the Iranian regime to threaten or to attack the United States of America any longer."
Yes, an American president is charged with defending the nation against imminent attack. Yes, the public certainly will support a war to defend ourselves and our allies. Americans will accept and endure higher gas prices, growing inflation, American deaths, even the horrific but predictable side effects of war — all war — such as the destruction of a school full of Iranian girls. The public will show a willingness to at least consider support, but only when it is respected enough to be shown proof.
That lack of respect will haunt the Trump administration.
This administration lies, steals, and covers up. If Trump stands for anything, it is that his corruption should be out in the open: accepting a plane, pushing crypto and meme-coins, indulging his self-dealing sons, his Department of Justice ignoring the law and failing to release files full of illegal redactions, all of it.
The administration simply has no credibility when it comes to the truth. The fact that it won't make even the most basic attempt at showing us the intelligence that gave Trump his "feeling" about Iran is simply devastating.
Americans don't like being "dissed." Ask the Hillary Clinton campaign, which in 2016 may have sealed its fate by calling many Trump voters "deplorables." Though she stated she didn't mean "all" Trump voters, the damage was done. Never disrespect a single voter. (Disrespect specific elements — hate the racism, the corruption, the faith-based aggression, attack it — but don't lob a personal attack, however true it may be.)
Trump's failure to bring "proof" of the need to strike Iran to Congress and the public is a statement to American voters: "You suckers aren't worth it, less 'deplorable,' more 'pathetic,' and thus unworthy of our seriousness."
In the end, this is what it gets down to. An administration so unserious as to make no effort to show us its war prevented an attack. The sneer tips the first domino, which falls hard into the next when American lives are lost, when Americans suffer pointless economic pain, and when Trump's obvious cover-up of the Epstein matter spills into the public sphere.
Trump may be immune to "scandal" but disrespecting Americans as it pertains to war and suffering at all levels is a new element. Look at the dissension in MAGA world already.
If the Epstein Files or economic collapse is the dynamite, the utter laziness — wearing a white cap at a dignified transfer of the greatest Americans, failing to bring forth anything resembling a reason for war — was the fuse.
Heading to the midterms, expect nothing more than reckless lashing out in an attempt to contain the damage. Expect, even, an attack on the election itself. The Trump White House cannot be bothered to respect Americans enough to show us one satellite photo of Iranian capabilities, one intercepted discussion between officials in Tehran, but it stands ready to bring inhuman effort to blocking a losing election. Bank on it now.
With the first dropped bomb, with the follow-up of just to "trust us," fate sets in — the rest is just timing, and the degree of blowback.
Boom.
- Jason Miciak is a former associate editor at Occupy Democrats, author, American attorney, and single-parent girldad. His soon to be released novel is available for beta readers. He can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com, on "X" @JasonMiciak, and on Bluesky.
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Trump's disastrous incompetence exposed with 5 obvious questions he never answered
Minimally competent leaders would have considered at least five obvious questions before launching the nation into war. President Donald Trump considered none of them.
1: What’s the objective?
It’s not surprising that more than half of all Americans oppose Trump’s War. From the outset, his administration has offered numerous and contradictory justifications for it.
February 28: Trump cited 47 years of grievances, a desire to destroy Iran’s missiles, and a message that the Iranian people should “seize the moment” because now was their chance to “be brave, be bold, be heroic, and take back your country.”
But he also said that the attack was a campaign to “eliminate the imminent nuclear threat,” although he had boasted in June that the United States had already accomplished that goal.
The same day, Trump told the Washington Post, “All I want if freedom for the people.”
United Nations Ambassador Mike Walz claimed to the UN Security Council that the US was invoking the right of self-defense in response to Iran’s imminent threat.
But the next day, Pentagon officials told congressional staff members that no intelligence supported the notion that Iran was planning to attack the US first.
March 2: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the press that the objective was retaliation for decades of Iranian behavior, destruction of their missiles, and providing an opportunity for Iranians to “take advantage of this incredible opportunity.”
But only hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a new justification for the war: Israel was going to attack Iran and, if that happened, Iran would then attack US interests in the region. He made it sound as if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had maneuvered Trump into a corner.
The next day, Trump contradicted Rubio, saying: “It was my opinion that they [Iran] were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn’t do it.” Rebutting any impression that Netanyahu had manipulated him, Trump added, “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”
Rubio complained that his earlier remarks had been taken out of context and the operation “had to happen anyway.”
March 6: Trump posted on social media that only “unconditional surrender” would end the war.
2: How long will it last?
March 1: Trump told the New York Times the operation could take “four to five weeks.” He didn’t mention the Pentagon’s concerns that the war could further deplete reserves that military strategists have said are critical for scenarios such as a conflict over Taiwan or Russian incursions into Europe.
March 2: Trump said that the war could go on longer than four to five weeks.
March 4: Hegseth said that the Iran war is “far from over” and has “only just begun.”
March 6: Trump told the New York Post he hadn’t ruled out putting “boots on the ground, if necessary.”
3: Who will lead Iran after its Supreme Leader is killed?
March 1: Trump told the New York Times he had “three very good choices” for who could lead Iran.
March 3: Trump admitted: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead… Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.” Asked about the worst-case scenario for the war, Trump said, “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person.”
More than a dozen Middle East countries are now embroiled in Trump’s war, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.
March 5: Trump told Axios, “I have to be involved in the appointment [of Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s successor], like with Delcy in Venezuela” — referring to Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, who remained in charge of Nicolás Maduro’s corrupt and repressive regime after the US abducted him. Trump said that Khamenei’s son — then rumored to be a leading candidate as successor — was “unacceptable to me” and “a light weight.”
The same day, he told NBC News, “We have some people who I think would do a good job.”
March 7: The Washington Post reported that a classified National Intelligence Committee study issued prior to the war found that even if the US launched a large-scale assault on Iran, it likely would not oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment.
March 9: Iran chose Khamenei’s son, a cleric expected to continue his father’s hardline policies, as the country’s Supreme Leader.
4: How would a war affect the Middle East?
Before US bombs began to fall, thousands of American citizens were in the war zone. But ahead of the strikes, the State Department didn’t issue official alerts advising Americans that the risk of travel in the region had increased.
Yael Lempert, who helped organize the evacuation of Americans in Libya in 2011, observed, “It is stunning there were no orders for authorized departure for nonessential US government employees and family members in almost all the affected diplomatic missions in the region — nor public recommendations to American citizens to depart — until days into the war.”
After attacks and counterattacks closed airspace and airports throughout the region, on Wednesday, March 4 — four days into the war — the State Department finally began evacuations by charter flight. The following day, the New York Times reported:
Until midweek, the State Department had mainly provided stranded travelers with basic information about security conditions and commercial travel options via a telephone hotline and text messages. Before Wednesday, desperate people calling the hotline got an automated message that said the US government could not help get them out of the region.
5: Could the war lead to humanitarian, economic, or geopolitical crises?
Only a week into the war, the UN humanitarian chief warned, “This is a moment of grave, grave peril.”
Iran is a country of 90 million people. US-Israel bombing has already displaced more than 100,000 of them.
Israel’s companion attack on Lebanon has displaced more than 300,000 residents.
More than a dozen countries are now embroiled in Trump’s war, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.
The ripple effects span the globe as oil prices spike and Iran disrupts tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz — through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flows. During his state of the union message, Trump boasted that the price of gasoline was down to $2,00 per gallon in some states. Last week, the national average price in the US was $3.41 per gallon.
Ominously, on March 6 the Washington Post reported that Russia is providing intelligence assistance to the Iranian military attacking US targets. But Hegseth is “not concerned about that.”
Asked to rate his Iran war performance on a scale of one to 10, Trump gave himself a “15.”
Introspection rarely accompanies incompetence.
- Steven J. Harper is an attorney, adjunct professor at Northwestern University Law School, and author of several books, including Crossing Hoffa: A Teamster's Story and The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. He has been a regular columnist for Moyers on Democracy, Dan Rather's News and Guts, and The American Lawyer. Follow him at thelawyerbubble.com.
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Dark new poll reveals something deeply broken in America — and it predates Trump
A survey released last Thursday by the Pew Research Center finds that 53 percent of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”).
This puts Americans way out front of other nations on the we-hate-our-compatriots scale. In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92 percent say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7 percent say they’re bad.
Why are we so down on our fellow citizens? It may have something to do with our politics.
Some 30 years ago, my dear friend, the late Republican Senator Alan Simpson, told me Democrats viewed Republicans as stupid and Republicans viewed Democrats as evil.
“I’d rather be in the stupid party,” he chuckled.
I asked him why Republicans saw Democrats as evil.
He took a deep breath. “Religion.”
I said I didn’t understand.
“It’s the Christian right,” he said as if talking to a five-year-old. “Since Reagan, my party has been a magnet for religious conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, where it’s all about good and evil. Too bad, pal. You’re on the evil side.”
That was 30 years ago. Since then, the divide has only sharpened.
In 2012, Mitt Romney told supporters that “47 percent” of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they’re “dependent upon government ... believe that they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... [and] pay no income tax.”
Insulting 47 percent of Americans was no way to win an election. It was also no way to unite the country.
Then in 2016, Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Also no way to win or to foster mutual trust.
Once Trump took office, dislike of our fellow citizens soared.
Before he entered the White House, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats said people in the opposing party were “immoral.”
By 2022, after years of Trump’s venom, 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats called people in the opposing party “immoral.”
Since he’s been back in the Oval, it’s got even worse.
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, Trump blamed a “radical left bunch of lunatics” for the killing. Vice President JD Vance, parroting Trump, vowed to “punish these radical leftist lunatics.”
As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted at the time, “Kirk’s assassination could have united Americans against political violence, but the Trump camp seems to be preparing a campaign to destroy opponents.”
When a federal judge ruled in March that Trump didn’t have authority to send National Guard troops into Los Angeles, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly — in language typical of what we hear from the Trump regime — called him a “rogue judge” and claimed Trump “saved Los Angeles” from “deranged leftist lunatics sowing mass chaos.”
After ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Kristi Noem, Trump’s former secretary of Homeland Security, called the two of them “domestic terrorists.”
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has sent out a steady stream of tweets — catching some 380 million views on X — claiming that its agents have been under attack by U.S. citizens whom it describes as “terrorists,” “rioters,” and “agitators,” and asserting, among other things, that “Americans are fed up with rampant criminality ruling this country.”
Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening to cut off funding for various programs that help poor Americans by vilifying them as “fraudsters” and withholding money from Democratic-led states.
A few days ago, Vance charged that Medicaid and food assistance programs were rife with fraud perpetrated by “bad actors in our society … who take the goodwill and trust of the American taxpayers and use it against us, [who] decide to make themselves rich.”
***
For almost a decade, Trump has told us that certain other Americans should be feared: among them, Democrats, liberals, Mexican Americans, Muslim Americans, Black Americans, transgender people, and LGBTQ+ people. All are presumed to be the “enemy within.”
As Barack Obama said at Jesse Jackson’s memorial on March 6, “Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.”
Is it any surprise that a majority of Americans now describe the morality of other Americans as “bad?”
But I can’t help wonder: How much of our distrust and resentment is the byproduct of something more fundamental that’s been unfolding in America for over four decades — something Trump took exploited but that would have invited a hateful demagogue like Trump eventually: the increasing concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands?
Trump took advantage of anger and distrust that had been building for years — at a system increasingly seen as rigged against most of us.
What do you think?
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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A murderous thug has dirt on Trump. Nothing else explains this madness
I never thought I’d see the day when an American president showed greater loyalty to a foreign adversary than to his own people, in a time of war.
But this is where we’re at with Donald John Trump and his mysterious adoration for, and apparent shrinking fear of, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It’s one of those love affairs that continues to defy logic yet is no longer questioned.
Trump won’t say a nasty word about Russia and certainly not about Putin. What could Putin have on Trump that turned him into such an unquestioning kowtowing toady, submitting to his leader’s every whim, defending his every position?
Trump somehow trusts the word of a murderous, deceitful thug, an international pariah, over any nonpartisan body in his own country.
The suspicion is that whatever Putin has on Trump is very, very bad. Epstein-related, maybe. It has to be something serious, because it’s not as if Trump is the kind of guy who just turns and grovels in the presence of any old brute.
I don’t buy the argument that it’s about respect, or fanboy support, even as Trump regularly calls Putin “strong,” “smart,” and “a genius.” No, this feels much more like persistent menace.
But not only is Trump’s behavior surrounding Putin pathetic and maddening: it’s grown increasingly dangerous.
This has become clear now that credible reports have surfaced about how Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran, to help it target U.S. military personnel and assets in the Middle East, providing locations of warships and aircraft.
It isn’t that this is a surprise. Far from it. Russia is perhaps Iran’s strongest ally. Putin’s aides acknowledge they are on Iran’s side. It makes sense Russia would be doing all it can to help Iran vanquish its enemy.
No, the only part that doesn’t easily compute is the reaction of the Trump administration. Instead of even pretending to be concerned by the news it has soft-peddled it, as if having been told that the countries are merely sharing opinions on their soccer teams.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to this news with a shrug and the head-scratching words, “It does not really matter.”
What? It “does not really matter” that an enemy is feeding intel to a nation you are fighting, and the chief executive of the United States continues to treat that enemy’s leader like a treasured pal?
She later expounded, “It clearly is not making any difference with respect to the military operation in Iran, because we are completely decimating them.”
Here's the reality: The thing that actually does not really matter is how well America may or may not be doing in the war with Iran. That isn’t the point. The point is that Russia is doing this, and this administration is continuing to treat it as an ally.
Of course, any flippant retort must be seen in light of the reality that Trump is and has always been Putin’s bitch. Everyone associated has gotten the memo and understands that Dear Leader will tolerate no dissing of Vladimir even if he is putting our troops directly in harm’s way.
It’s even worse than that, actually. Since Trump (via the U.S. Treasury) issued a temporary waiver this month, allowing India to purchase embargoed Russian crude oil and petroleum products, the president is helping line Russia's pockets with money it can use to help gather information that will lead to endangering our troops.
In effect, Trump is paying Russia to help Iran attack the U.S.
Let that sink in.
There’s a word for this: treason.
How much more evidence do people need that for whatever reason Trump cares more about Russia than he does the nation he serves as president? This isn’t hyperbole. It’s right there to see.
You have to imagine Russia might not be restricting its intel to the Middle East. It could be feeding Iran info on where we might be vulnerable to a 9/11-style attack.
If that happens, I doubt the Trump response would be, “Doesn’t matter. It’s war, and innocent people are going to get hurt. If it weren’t Russia, it would have been somebody else.”
But here is what Trump actually said about Russia over the weekend, onboard Air Force One: “If you take a look at what’s happened in Iran in the last week, if they’re getting information, it’s not helping that much.”
Again, this is essentially a confirmation that reports of Russian assistance to Iran may be accurate. Everyone associated with Trump, including Trump, understands that this read on the situation is senseless, but saying anything even remotely negative about Russia and Putin is out of bounds.
As usual, what Trump cares about most is taking care of Trump. During Saturday’s dignified transfer returning the remains of six U.S. soldiers killed in the conflict with Iran, he wore a white USA baseball cap, on sale for $55 in his campaign store.
If you’re Trump, there is no such thing as demonstrating class or even the thinnest volume of compassion for people who die for their country. Unless, of course, the country in question is Russia.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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Trump's 'macho' monsters just revealed what they really are
Across Iran and the Caribbean, Donald Trump and his lickspittles delight in killing as if people were expendable scenery, not human beings with loved ones and families. Meanwhile, they ignore the death and destruction their fellow psychopath, Vladimir Putin, rains down on Ukraine every night.
India and America invite Iran to send an UNARMED ship to the Indian Ocean to participate in military exercises, and Trump and Whiskey Pete decided it would be fun to blow it out of the water, leaving more than 100 sailors miles from shore, desperate for a rescue. Instead of saving them, as international law requires, we simply left them to drown.
Whiskey Pete called it “quiet death.” In fact, there was a lot of screaming and sobbing, although the bombers couldn’t hear it from 20,000 feet any more than Hegseth could in his drunken haze.
Just like they blew up a boat in the Caribbean and then, when two fishermen survived clinging to a piece of debris and were desperately waving for help, came back with an illegally unmarked plane and blew them into bits of blood and gristle. Another clear violation of international and American law.
And then they bombed a girl’s school in Iran, killing at least 160 children, and then lied about it while also humble-bragging that “people will die” in their war of choice. As Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller gleefully announced after the little girls were slaughtered:
“What you’re seeing right now … is a military under President Trump’s leadership that is not fighting politically correct. That isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”
And Hegseth bragged:
“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars.”
When he was asked about the six American soldiers who were killed because Putin is helping Iran target Americans in the region, his reply was disgusting:
“When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad.”
These are the ghouls who were delighted — thrilled — when masked ICE thugs in Minneapolis shot Renee Good in the face and Alex Pretti in the back. They then went on TV, giddy, and smeared them to the world. And killed dozens of people so far this year in their concentration camps while delighting in tearing children from their parents.
Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 who’s gleefully overseen the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, shattering their lives and families while throwing the American government into crisis, apparently gets off on thinking of them crying themselves to sleep at night, worrying about getting thrown out on the street with their children because they can’t pay rent:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
Yeah, trauma. It’s what today’s Republicans love, so long as it happens to other people. It’s their drug of choice.
Vought’s and Musk’s massive cuts to the federal workforce to pay for tax cuts for billionaires — in this case, laying off thousands from the National Weather Service — meant that families in Michigan had virtually no warning that tornadoes were bearing down on them this past weekend. Three people are now dead and a dozen more in the hospital clinging to life.
Of course they weren’t billionaires, so their lives don’t much matter, right? Like the millions who lost their health insurance when the Big Beautiful Bill redirected ACA subsidies and Medicaid revenue to tax cuts for the morbidly rich. Or the pregnant women across red states who are dying at more than twice the rate of women in blue states because of misogynistic GOP anti-abortion laws.
Trump, Hegseth, Vance, Miller, Leavitt, et al think this sort of thing makes them seem “macho” and “tough.” Nearly 90 percent of Republican voters agree with them.
What it really does is reveal them as psychopaths, the very human embodiment of evil. If they’d been born in a different time or place, they’d be Ted Bundys or Charles Mansons and their GOP followers would be “good Germans” watching with a smile and a salute as the boxcars roll by.
When those six U.S. service members were killed by Iranian retaliation, Trump refused to remove his $50 souvenir hat (available for sale on his website) or bow his head and shrugged, saying that “sadly, there will likely be more … That’s the way it is.”
Those soldiers are just suckers and losers, after all; they should have had the good sense of the Trump men to complain about bone spurs or simply flee the country to avoid the draft, like Grandpa Drumpf did when Germany kicked him out for refusing to serve.
“War Secretary” Hegseth — with his Crusader cross and Dius Vult slogan tattoos — brags that they’ve “only just begun” putting “narco‑terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” with no interest in who is actually on board the boats they’re striking. After all, they’re not white people and they’re not rich.
This isn’t the language of leaders reluctantly using force as a last resort; it’s the rhetoric of psychopaths who see the rest of humanity as disposable, as dots in a video game, as objects whose death is entertainment, so long as their own luxury and power are secure.
Elon Musk throws a quarter-billion dollars into the 2024 election to put Trump in the White House and in turn is given an opportunity to kill over a million Black and brown children on the other side of the planet by gutting USAID. As Bill Gates noted, it was “the richest man in the world killing the poorest children.”
When a college Republican chat room devolved into a Nazi-loving, Black- and Hispanic-loathing festival of hate, conspiracy theories, and Hitler adoration last week it was just another Thursday. Like Musk giving the Nazi salute — twice — at a Trump rally.
My dad’s Republican Party — Eisenhower’s and Romney’s and McCain’s Republican Party — is long dead and gone, and in its place is a cult built on grievance, paranoia, white supremacy, and a love for authoritarian strongmen including Putin and Orbán.
They delight in death and destruction. They love the language of blood and gore. They’re monsters.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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This is Trump's tell that all isn't well
Years ago, I was drinking with friends in a dive bar with a jukebox. I went over, quarters in hand, and noticed “It’s the Same Old Song” by the Four Tops, sitting there in the catalog, and chuckled.
I decided to play it ten times in a row.
Every few minutes, as we drank, the same Motown classic kicked on again. Eventually one of my friends cracked, “Why do they keep playing this same song?” A moment later, the realization dawned.
That moment has been rattling around in my head lately, because Donald Trump and officials in his administration have been doing something remarkably similar. Whenever they’re confronted with uncomfortable questions, whether about corruption, incompetence, policy failures, scandal or even war, they walk up to the metaphorical jukebox and punch in the number.
Except their tune isn’t Motown.
It’s the stock market.
In Trump’s second term, the administration has relied on a single talking point whenever things get awkward: a rising Dow Jones Industrial Average. Lately, since it went past 50,000, they’ve relied on it more. Alas, at this writing, it’s down around 47,000.
No matter the topic, no matter the controversy, someone in Trumpworld brings the conversation back to the same supposed proof of success.
If critics raise concerns about tariffs or inflation, the response is: Look at the Dow.
If lawmakers question government misconduct, the answer is: Look at the Dow.
If scandals erupt — the same old song again. Just look at the Dow.
Attorney General Pam Bondi delivered perhaps the most jaw-dropping example, during a tense House Judiciary Committee hearing last month. Pressed about why her Justice Department had failed to indict Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators, Bondi didn’t provide an explanation. She didn’t offer new evidence or promise transparency.
Instead, she blurted out: “The Dow is over 50,000 right now!”
It was so stupid it sounded like a cruel joke. Epstein survivors were sitting right behind her. Yet Bondi doubled down, insisting Congress should be discussing the booming stock market rather than pressing her about Epstein’s network.
She even mocked Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), sarcastically calling him a “great stock trader” while dismissing questions with hissy fits of whack-o false factoids.
Bondi’s performance, tone-deaf and nonsensical, perfectly encapsulated the messaging strategy that defines Trump’s second term. When in doubt, play the stock market song.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sings it, arguing that the market “lives in the future” and that soaring share prices prove investors believe Trump’s policies will produce prosperity.
Vice President JD Vance has incorporated the talking point into his claim that the economy deserves an “A-plus-plus-plus,” assuring voters that gains on Wall Street will translate into real benefits for ordinary families.
National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett echoes the theme, pointing to market valuations as evidence economic “lift-off” is driven by investment.
Loathsome lickspittle House Speaker Mike Johnson joins the chorus, invoking the “Trump effect” when the market hits a milestone.
Historically, the U.S. stock market has recovered and risen. But the problem with building an entire political narrative around it is that markets are fickle. They surge, stall, and sometimes plunge. And lately, the market has started reacting to the instability the administration prefers not to discuss.
Trump’s impulsive decision to launch military action against Iran has sent tremors through global markets. Oil prices surged, as tanker traffic slowed through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes for energy supplies.
Investors tend to despise uncertainty, and Trump’s erratic explanations for the conflict and its future have only deepened concerns about how long the crisis could last and how far it might escalate.
Does it end in four-to-five weeks? Tomorrow? Will we put boots on the ground?
The market reaction to such questions has been swift and punishing. Monday’s numbers were all over the place, as investors tried to digest the geopolitical shock alongside growing warning signs at home.
One of those signs arrived last Friday, in the form of a very poor jobs report. Economists had already warned that the labor market was cooling after years of robust growth. The latest data confirmed those fears.
At the same time, inflation remains. Many projections suggest core inflation will linger between roughly 2.6 and 2.8 percent through the end of the year, with some economists warning it could climb higher if tariffs and fiscal deficits continue to push prices up.
Those tariffs, combined with restrictive immigration policies, and the implications of rising fuel prices because of this war, are a confluence of danger signs for Trump.
The result is an economy that looks far less rosy than administration talking points suggest. Consumers continue to grapple with high costs for groceries, housing, and other necessities.
This Trump administration has relied on the stock market as its universal answer to critics. Questions about corruption are waved away with reference to record highs. Concerns about inflation are brushed aside with the same statistics. Even uncomfortable questions about Epstein were dismissed by pointing to the Dow.
But if the market continues to sink, becomes combustible or even stagnates, that shield disappears.
And that raises an uncomfortable question for Trump and his allies: if the one metric they’ve celebrated suddenly stops cooperating, what do they have left to point to?
Sooner or later, people will figure out that the same old market song was nothing but a joke.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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Red state that warned us about bears on cocaine now wants Trump on steroids
Tired of Black people thinking their lives matter? Sick of hearing Spanish every time you’re in a Miami restaurant? Annoyed by uppity women asserting their so-called rights, gay types flaunting themselves by getting married and taking out mortgages, unwashed tree-huggers trying to stop righteous sprawl, and Marxist high school teachers making kids study pornographic Shakespeare plays?
Generally fed up with the 21st century?
Florida is here for you!
This state will take you back — way back — to a time when white men were men, white women were ladies, and dark-complected folks knew their place; a time when a man could pollute all he liked, tell hilarious jokes about breasts, Jews, and “coloreds,” and discriminate to his heart’s content.
Your Florida Legislature has already nixed all that “African-American Studies” and DEI nonsense.
I mean, what’s so bad about white culture? White people built this country — with some help from immigrant workers from Africa who, as Gov. Ron DeSantis says, “developed skills that, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Plus, in the sure and certain hope the U.S. Supreme Court will finish off what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, your Florida Legislature will cut some new districts making it damn near impossible to elect Black people.
Nothing wrong with that: Most of them fail to vote correctly.
As for the so-called “Latinos,” most of them have no business being here.
So, what if some came over in, like, 1513?
Our people (remember, we built the country!) threw them out, except for the Cubans we allowed to stay in Miami to make tasty coffee and tres leches cakes.
Out of control
Aliens are invading by the bazillions, and they’re the Worst of the Worst.
Nationwide, a solid 29 percent of ICE arrestees are convicted criminals. The rest haven’t quite gotten around to being criminals but you know they’re thinking about it, especially the ones claiming asylum or waiting for Green Cards.
The point is, this minority thing is out of control.
Ergo, we must go back to our glorious past.
Say, 1956.
That’s the year Florida state Sen. Charley Johns set up a committee to root out communists and homosexuals in Florida universities.
Turned out those crafty commies managed to evade detection — back then.
But, just like in the 1950s (blessed era!), Florida is once again determined to clamp down on higher ed’s fellow travelers, those tenured pinko professors in colleges our governor calls “indoctrination camps.”
In addition, the governor and Legislature have made sure youthful fascination with collectivism will be nipped in the bud.
By the time first-graders start sharing their toys and proclaiming in their little voices that capitalism is oppression, they’ll be hurled into Florida’s K-12 “History of Communism” class, where they’ll learn about the wickedness of Jane Fonda (among others) and get straightened out.
The Johns Committee had more luck identifying suspected Friends of Dorothy, male students who wore Bermuda shorts, or professors seen eating lunch with other men.
Between 1958 and 1962, scores were driven out of the University of Florida alone.
Our wise leaders are continuing that fine work, forbidding the flying of rainbow flags, fighting drag queen Christmas shows, banning books about two boy penguins raising a chick, and making dang sure pronouns = genitalia.
None of that “gender theory” nonsense.
If some teenage missy gets herself in the family way, she needs to suck it up, marry the boy, and birth that baby.
Women were so much happier when they didn’t bother their little heads about college and careers, and settled down early to housekeeping and diaper-changing.
Ask your granny: She’ll tell you how fun it was.
While you’re at it, ask her about that Golden Age when you could make an honest buck in phosphate, cellulose, cane, and cows without some greenie weenie getting his knickers in a twist about pollution.
You used to be able to smell Jacksonville long before you saw it: gleaming paper mills and chemical plants pumped out the profits.
Yes, people would feel a bit queasy if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, but a little toxicity never hurt anybody.
Not too much, anyway.
If everything got covered in yellow goo and, if during the 1970s, Duval County had the nation’s highest rate of lung cancer deaths, surely a little discomfort was worth it.
As Jax folks used to say, “Smells like money!”
In the 1960s, phosphate operations blossomed across Central Florida, making several dozen people extremely rich, making golf course grass great again, and beautifying the landscape with 40-story gyp stacks.
But, starting in the 1980s, do-gooders and enviro-freaks started carrying on about “pollution” and forced the Democrats who ran the state back then to start cleaning the place up.
Then, just because the seas started to rise, the state got hotter, the storms got stronger, and the floods more frequent, a bunch of hysterics started hollering about a planetary climate crisis and people started demanding the government do something about greenhouse gases and microplastics and all the things we love about post-industrial capitalism.
It’s a new dawn around here.
Daddy issues
And Florida is so over that climate change hoax.
Your Legislature is trying to outlaw woke towns’ and cities’ attempts to institute lower emissions and sustainable energy policies.
None of that One World Government net-zero garbage getting in the way of our fine energy extraction businesses’ need for profit.
Yeah, the locals hate it, just like they hate Rep. Jason Shoaf’s proposal to dredge a huge channel through the St. Joseph Bay.
He wants to bring big, beautiful cargo ships to the northern Gulf.
What’s the problem? For 60 years, the Joe Paper Mill dumped dioxins in the bay.
(See “smells like money” above.)
The poo-pooers and their “scientist” friends will tell you churning up the dioxins now buried under tons of silt might not be a great idea for the local environment.
Rep. Shoaf says, “The sea grasses and the health of the bay was much better back then when the port was active.”
He assures us there will be no environmental damage, carcinogens or no carcinogens.
Anyway, who are you going to believe, environmental scientists and citizens who actually live there or the guy who valiantly warned us about the danger of bears on cocaine?
The rest of you should understand that if we’re going to make it back to the halcyon days of 1956, we must trust our government.
Our government knows best.
Keep repeating: Florida’s government knows best.
Daddy knows best.
- Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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These Republicans just told on themselves with a familiar Washington magic trick
There is a familiar Washington magic trick, and Missouri’s U.S. senators perform it with unusual confidence: Spend years denouncing the bipartisan cult of stupid wars, then salute smartly when your own president lights the fuse.
Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt have both marketed themselves as realists, skeptics of permanent intervention and the old foreign-policy catechism. Hawley said in 2019 that the point of American foreign policy is “not to remake the world,” and in 2023 said flatly that “regime change didn’t work.” Schmitt built a parallel brand in softer packaging, attacking the “failed Washington way” on foreign policy, repeatedly calling Donald Trump the “peace president” and insisting he did not want “a forever war in the Middle East.”
And then came Iran, the moment when rhetoric had to cash out and both men opposed the effort to reassert congressional authority over war powers.
Hawley — who had earlier said it would be “a whole different matter” for the United States to affirmatively strike Iran and that he would be “real concerned” by that prospect — found a way to make his peace with it once it was Trump making the call. He defended Trump’s actions as lawful so long as no ground troops were involved.
Schmitt, who had spent months selling Trump’s foreign policy in the language of restraint, landed in the same place. Suddenly the old concerns about executive overreach, strategic drift and another Middle East trap looked less like convictions than talking points with expiration dates.
That is the tell. Politicians change their minds all the time. Hawley and Schmitt change in one direction only: toward Trump.
Hawley ran the same play on Medicaid cuts, warning they would hurt Missouri’s rural hospitals and the people who depend on them. The warning was real enough. Then came the vote, and there he was, backing the bill anyway. Later he moved to soften or undo parts of what he had just supported, which is another neat bit of Washington stagecraft: denounce the harm, help cause the harm, then reappear as the man racing in with a bucket of water.
Schmitt’s contradictions are less theatrical than Hawley’s, but no less revealing. Last year he demanded the Epstein files be released — “Hell yeah. Open it up. Release the Epstein files” — then grew markedly more careful once Trump was back in office, saying only that he was “curious” and would support releasing whatever “credible information” might be there.
A self-proclaimed free speech warrior as Missouri’s attorney general, he seemed perfectly comfortable last year when government pressure bore down on late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel after a joke about the late conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk.
That is the through line with Hawley and Schmitt: every principle has an escape hatch. They are against regime change until their president bombs Iran. Against Medicaid cuts until leadership needs the vote. Against censorship until they do not like what is being said.
What Hawley and Schmitt understand, maybe better than most, is that modern political branding rewards the appearance of rebellion almost as much as rebellion itself.
You do not have to resist the machinery. You only have to speak as if you might. You can sneer at the old consensus, campaign against the old order, strike the pose of the insurgent — and then, when the moment comes, vote like a company man.
- Jason Hancock has spent two decades covering politics and policy for news organizations across the Midwest, with most of that time focused on the Missouri statehouse as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. A three-time National Headliner Award winner, he helped launch The Missouri Independent in October 2020. Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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