Opinion
This is hands down the stupidest member of Trump's Cabinet
Friends, At a press briefing on Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained about a CNN report that the Trump administration had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic by closing the Strait of Hormuz. “Patently ridiculous,” Hegseth told reporters, adding — even as the strait’s blockage was proving to be Iran’s most powerful leverage in the war — we “don’t need to worry about it.” He also denied that the U.S. bombed the school where some 175 children were killed. Hegseth added that, as to CNN, “the sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” These remarks are remarkably stupid, on several levels. First, CNN got it absolutely right in reporting that Trump’s national security team had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic. CNN cited “multiple sources familiar with the matter.” The New York Times published a similar story, reporting that in the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, “Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets.” Even The Wall Street Journal, hardly a New York Times or CNN clone, substantiated the story on Friday, reporting that Trump rejected warnings that Iran would likely retaliate by closing the strait because he believed Iran would capitulate before doing so, and he assumed that even if Iran tried to close it, the U.S. military could handle it. Second, Hegseth’s comment that we “don’t need to worry about” the blockage of the strait is not only false but flippantly insulting to an American public that deserves to know what the Trump regime is planning to do about soaring prices at the gas pump, directly due to that blockage. Third, even if Hegseth believes that David Ellison’s ownership of CNN will silence CNN’s critical coverage of Trump, it’s remarkably stupid of Hegseth to say it out loud. “The sooner David Ellison takes over CNN, the better” is an open admission that Trump backed Ellison’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent, to silence criticism. That deal is still pending, so Hegseth’s admission is likely to fuel even more opposition to it. California’s attorney general has already suggested he’ll go to court to block it. Now other attorneys general, the ACLU, and Democrats in Congress may join the case as co-plaintiffs. Hegseth’s admission also confirms CNN’s worst fears that Ellison will throttle criticism of Trump — a fear that’s already caused several leading lights to exit. As Variety put it, “Anderson, cooped. Jake, tapped. Erin, burnt. Kasie, hunted. Wolf, blitzed.” Ellison has already proven himself an unreliable steward of journalistic independence at CBS News. One departing producer there explained in a farewell memo to colleagues that she could no longer work where stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit, but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.” Finally, Hegseth’s denial that the U.S. is responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 schoolchildren in Iran is belied by mounting evidence that the U.S. did bomb the school. Hegseth’s further insistence that the U.S. “never targets civilians” is refuted by the U.S. military’s killing of at least 157 people on 40 small boats in the Caribbean without evidence they were “narcoterrorists” rather than civilians. And, friends, this was just one news conference. Pete Hegseth’s job is so far over his head that he can’t even see it. He evidently believes it’s to cheerlead and defend Trump with bonkers claims like “We didn't start this war, but under President Trump we’re finishing it” and “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy” and “we will show no quarter for our enemies.” (“No quarter” means kill everyone and take no prisoners, which is a war crime.) In the days leading up to the U.S. attack on Iran, Hegseth spent his time criticizing “wokeness” at American universities, feuding with Anthropic over safeguards for AI, and, in the day before the war began, forcing Scouting America to abandon programs aimed at promoting diversity. He dismisses war crimes, pooh-poohs the rules of engagement, and projects unequivocal belligerence at a time when the United States is rapidly losing whatever moral standing it had in the world. Granted, it’s difficult to select one of Trump’s Cabinet members as the stupidest. But Pete Hegseth stands out for sheer boneheaded ignorance. Pray for America and the world. |
- 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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The single move that will bring Trump's plans crashing down
The drumbeats for expanding our (and Israel’s) war with Iran are loud.
Cable news panels talk about strategy. Politicians talk about deterrence. Pentagon briefings talk about targets and timelines. But there’s one thing missing from almost every conversation in Washington.
Risk.
Not the geopolitical kind. Not the think-tank kind. Real risk. The kind that lands in your living room in the form of a letter from the government telling your family that your child is being sent to war.
For most of modern America’s leaders — and certainly for generations of the Trump family — that risk simply doesn’t exist.
We live in a country where fewer than one percent of the population serves in the military. The burden of fighting America’s wars has been placed on a narrow slice of our people. They’re mostly working class, many come from rural communities, and many join because it’s one of the few stable ways to get healthcare, education benefits, and a future.
Meanwhile the people who debate whether we should be bombing Iran are almost never sending their own kids.
That didn’t used to be the case.
During World War II nearly every American family had someone in uniform. War was a shared national sacrifice, and politicians understood that every decision they made could cost the life of one of theirs or their neighbor’s son or daughter.
I remember well how Vietnam brought that reality home in a different way. I hated it, protested against it, got kicked out of school for those protests, and still curse LBJ and Nixon for their lies that killed nearly 60,000 of my fellow citizens. But that, in retrospect, is exactly how it should be. That protest/debate was a good thing for our nation, every bit as good as the war was wrong and bad.
The draft lottery meant that millions of young Americans suddenly had skin in the game of war. College campuses erupted in protest not because students were uniquely radical but because they knew they might soon be the ones crawling through rice paddies under machine gun fire in a war that the country had, by then, fully realized was based on lies.
The draft was what forced our country, our families from coast-to-coast, to confront the human cost of war. And eventually it forced our government to end that war.
In 1973 Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and created today’s all-volunteer military. The argument sounded reasonable at the time, particularly after the upheaval of Vietnam. A professional military would be more skilled and more motivated, they said. It would be more competent, even more lethal.
But then something else happened because the draft ended: war became easier for politicians to throw our military into, because the dissenting voices in the ranks had vanished.
When only a tiny slice of Americans are at risk for fighting, bleeding, and dying, the political price of launching a war drops dramatically. Congress members can vote for military action without worrying that their own children or those of their constituents will pay the price. Television pundits can cheer for bombing campaigns without imagining their own kids in uniform.
The result has been nearly nonstop war for half a century, from Ronald Reagan’s attack on Grenada straight through to today.
Afghanistan lasted 20 years. Iraq dragged on for nearly two decades. The United States has been involved in military operations across the Middle East and Africa that most Americans can barely locate on a map.
Now we’re staring at the possibility that Trump’s attacks against Iran could metastasize into World War III.
The stakes here are much higher than George W. Bush’s wars that he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, were fought to get him a second term in the White House. Iran isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan: it’s a nation of nearly 90 million people with a large military, deep regional alliances, and the ability to disrupt global energy markets overnight. It’s twice the size of Iraq or Texas.
And a war there could ignite the entire Middle East, which could easily spread to Europe (and already has, in a minor way, with Iran’s attacks on Cyprus and their missiles sent at Turkey). As we deplete our munitions, it might also encourage China to try to take Taiwan.
Yet the discussion among Republicans in Washington sounds strangely casual. Analysts debate air strikes on TV and guess about retaliation scenarios the way sports commentators pontificate about playoff strategies. Pete Hegseth struts and preens for the camera like a tough guy.
All because it’s easy to talk that way when you know your family won’t be fighting.
Now, imagine a different system.
Imagine that the United States had a national draft that applied equally to everyone. Rich kids and poor kids. Red states and blue states. The children of senators, CEOs, and television hosts alongside the children of factory workers and teachers.
This is how it works today in Norway (includes women), Sweden (includes women), Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, Israel (includes women), South Korea, Singapore, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, and Sweden young people can opt to serve in the nonprofit sector (like hospitals or environmental work) instead of the military.
The draft provides a right of passage into adulthood for young people, something found in the history of every society. Those who serve for a year could be rewarded with free college or trade school. They’d get out of their local bubble, see the world, meet and work side-by-side with people who don’t look or speak or pray like them.
These are all good outcomes of national service.
And it’s successful: other than Israel, which has its own unique problems, you’re not hearing much bellicose war rhetoric from any of those nations’ leaders.
If we had that here, do you think Republicans would still talk so casually about war with Iran? Would Congress rush to authorize military force if their own sons and daughters might be called up next month?
History suggests the answer is no.
Countries with universal service become more cautious about war because the entire society feels the consequences. Parents ask harder questions, students organize, and communities demand clear, explicit, detailed answers about why a conflict is necessary and exactly what victory would look like.
Shared sacrifice, in other words, produces democratic accountability. And right now America doesn’t have that.
Instead, we’ve created a system where war is something that happens to somebody else, that roughly one percent who volunteer. It’s fought by someone else’s kids. It’s endured by someone else’s family.
That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work.
The Founders of our republic deeply distrusted standing armies, so much so that they wrote into the Constitution that the army must be funded every two years or it will cease to exist. It’s right there in Article I, forcing our country to reevaluate our military and its use every time Congress reconvenes:
“The Congress shall have Power…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”
They believed that America should only go to war when the public truly understood the stakes and Congress had engaged in a vigorous, public debate about it. That’s why declaring war was not among the powers the Constitution gives the president.
“The Congress shall have Power…to declare War…”
When there was a national consensus, and only then, would we go to war. Citizen soldiers were supposed to ensure that war remained a last resort rather than a convenient tool of foreign policy. This BS like Republicans today are doing as they hold briefings for Congress behind closed doors would have horrified them.
And ignoring that concern is how Trump got us here: the all-volunteer military quietly erased that safeguard.
Don’t take me wrong: the men and women who volunteer to serve our nation deserve enormous respect. They’ve carried the weight of America’s wars with courage and sacrifice.
The problem isn’t them: it’s the rest of us. When the risks of war are concentrated in a small segment of society, the rest of the nation stops paying attention. Politicians face less pressure, military interventions multiply, and wealthy defense contractors prosper.
The human cost of war, in other words, gets hidden.
But a fair national draft would change that overnight.
It wouldn’t make America more warlike: history shows it would do the opposite. If every family knew their children could be sent to fight, Americans would demand diplomacy first, second, and third.
Wars would still happen when they truly had to, but they wouldn’t happen so casually. A president who just orders the troops to start shooting at a country like Iran would be held to account by every family in the country.
As the war with Iran grows hotter, we should be asking a simple question that almost nobody in Washington wants to hear:
“If the road to war with Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire and political class to march beside everyone else’s kids, would we still be there?”
- 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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Ron DeSantis won't drop this racist lie
“There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.” – Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897), American abolitionist and author
Since he became governor, Ron DeSantis has made anti-Blackness — by way of race-tinged rhetoric, policy, and legislation — one of the major pillars of his administration.
He is not alone.
A persistent narrative spun by a wide swathe of white Republicans is that white people are under attack and suffering harm because of reverse discrimination. The clamor is that white Americans are now the most disenfranchised group in the United States.
The narrative is of rampant anti-white racism, the difficulties and challenges whites encounter in all aspects of their life, and the jobs, housing, and other opportunities denied them because unfair laws, policies, and programs are skewed to benefit African Americans, Latinos, Native American, and other non-white people. All this noise is disingenuous.
Since each man came into office, both the DeSantis and the Trump administrations have partnered on a sardonic crusade, labeling DEI programs as indoctrination and discrimination while forcefully dismantling affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in government, education, and commerce.
Republican operatives have unleashed a groundswell of recrimination that has deepened the already profound racial divisions that have sadly become a routine feature of life in the United States.
Yet this entire premise of Black people being afforded an unfair privilege is built on a centuries-old lie.
Slavery is America’s Original Sin, the perpetual stain that DeSantis, Trump, and other apologists spend inordinate time trying to convince us that none of it really happened. Yet for the more than 400 years since enslaved Africans have been in this country, the dominant majority has erected physical, social, political, psychological, economic, and other barriers to any Black progress.
Confrontation between integrationists and segregationists at a whites-only beach in St. Augustine, June 25, 1964. Still from FHP film. (Via State Library and Archives of Florida)
Struggle
It has been a monumental struggle all these years for African Americans to move past the obstacles set in their way including chattel slavery, Jim Crow, de jure and de facto segregation, and redlining.
The Florida American Civil Liberties Union notes that “throughout his tenure, this governor has used the power of his office to subjugate and control the lives of Black people in Florida. But slavery is over, and we’re not asking for our freedom anymore. We’re taking it.”
DeSantis and his administration, the ALCU said, are “on a crusade this election season to stop progress and keep in place coercive and unfair laws that control the bodies of Black people in Florida.” If they prevail, “the lives of people who are historically the most impacted by these policies will continue to be at risk: Black people.”
The ACLU adds, “The administration of Gov. DeSantis has demonstrated a disdain for Black people and their lives in Florida. His actions as governor demonstrate that under his governance, the lives of Black people are expendable.”
The anti-DEI campaign has targeted Florida’s public schools, teachers, universities, professors, and businesses. To wit: Florida’s 12 public universities have been prohibited from using state or federal funds for DEI programs, following legislation signed by the governor and reinforced by the State Board of Governors.
Recently, Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier launched yet another legal fusillade at what’s left of Florida’s already weakened DEI programs.
In what might be the coup de grâce, Uthmeier released a legal opinion declaring that many of the established DEI and affirmative action measures in Florida’s public and private sectors constitute unlawful race‑based discrimination under federal and state law.
“Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a formal opinion finding that dozens of state laws requiring race-based preferences, classifications, or quotas violate the Equal Protection Clause and Florida’s Constitution. Relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s holding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the opinion states that Florida will not defend or enforce statutes that mandate race-based decision making,” according to CWC, “a national association of employers committed to effective labor and employment law compliance and the sensible regulation of the U.S. workplace.”
The CWC report notes that “these letters do not change federal law, but they reflect an increasingly aggressive enforcement posture by state officials and reinforce heightened scrutiny of race conscious policies following [the] Harvard [ruling]. It would not be surprising if other state attorneys general weigh in, either echoing these concerns or offering a sharply different view, adding to legal and political uncertainty for multi-state employers.
Republicans, MAGA — perhaps most Americans — love to brag that the U.S. is a meritocracy but that is fiction.
A glance at the racial landscape across America tells a different story. White people comprise 59% of the U.S. population but dominate in just about all spheres of American life.
Confrontation between integrationists and segregationists at a whites-only beach in St. Augustine, June 25, 1964. Still from FHP film. (Via State Library and Archives of Florida)The real race disparities
A 2014 study by the Women Donors Network found that 95% of the 2,437 elected state and local prosecutors in the United States — who wield tremendous power — were white, with 79% being white men, despite white men representing only 31% of the population. This lack of diversity significantly affects the fate of defendants who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic.
Only 1% of elected prosecutors were non-white women. In 66% of states that elect prosecutors, there were no black prosecutors, while 15 states had only white prosecutors. We can blame the ol’ boys network, which is reflected in the reality that 85% of incumbent prosecutors run for re-election unopposed.
In other fields:
- America’s Fortune 500 corporations with the highest revenue generated employ a mere eight black CEOs.
- 80% of all public-school teachers are white despite the diversity of America’s student population and students of color making up more than half of the student body.
- A white high school dropout has an easier time getting a job than a Black man with a college degree, so Black men’s educational levels do not guarantee equal job opportunities.
And perhaps the biggest data point, massive wealth disparity. Statistics show that wealth disparities between Black and white households in the United States are profound and pervasive, with white households possessing almost 10 times more median wealth than Black households. In 2022, the median wealth for white households was about $285,000, while for Black households it was $44,900.
White households, comprising 60% of the population, held 84% of total U.S. household wealth in 2020, while Black households (13.4% of the population) held 4%.
A RAND study regards the wealth gap as the present-day manifestation of that history of lost income and lost opportunity. The gap has been widening, year after year, for at least the past 30 years. In fact, it has only meaningfully narrowed in recent years during moments of economic turmoil, when housing and stock prices fell.
“You can see how it becomes this baked-in system, with every generation having less to pass down to the next generation,” said Jonathan Welburn, an expert in economic analysis and lead author of Rand’s wealth gap study. “Yesterday’s segregation is today’s wealth gap. We like to pretend that we live in a race-neutral, merit-based society now, that this is all in the past, but you can’t erase history. It shows up in our wealth. For many, it shows up in the lack of wealth.”
Demonstrators gathered in Tallahassee near the Florida Capitol on May 31, 2020, to protest the police killing of George Floyd. (Photo by Peter T. Reinwald)
Redlining and more
In Florida, the gap between Blacks and whites is driven by institutional and systemic structures that include unequal access to housing and jobs; disinvestment in Black and brown communities; redlining; the unwillingness of banks to give African Americans loans at the same rate and percentage as whites; lower investment returns; and a centuries-long legacy of discrimination.
Palm Beach Post reporter Wayne Washington wrote about the effects of racism, discrimination and segregation on Black Floridians in 2023. He detailed in his story the reality that, “on a broad range of issues — financial, political, social — Black Floridians still lag behind white Floridians and in many areas the gap has grown. In DeSantis’ Florida, he writes, Black residents are sicker, poorer, less educated. It’s getting worse.”
Former state Sen. Bobby Powell, a West Palm Beach Democrat and former chair of the state’s Black Legislative Caucus, said the DeSantis administration is more interested in scoring political points at Black people’s expense than working to improve their lives.
“Right now, we’re under a regime that works to attack the idea of diversity and inclusion,” Powell says in the story. “People are jumping on that bandwagon. We’ve got gaps now that I think will grow even larger.”
Researchers from the United Way argue that “such institutionalized racism will not solve itself. Black babies in Florida are half as likely to see their first birthday. Black men have the shortest life expectancy of any group in the United States.”
More than half of black households in Florida live below the United Way’s Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed (ALICE) threshold.
“Segregation persists. The average black household with an income of more than $60,000 lived in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than did the average white household earning less than $20,000. It isn’t getting better,” the report said.
Supporters of affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion point out that one important element of the fight is to reframe these initiatives as benefits to society, individuals, and communities — to highlight attempts to reach parity and equality and eschew preferential treatment. They also advise implementation of new and innovative ways to leverage data proving the return on investment from building a culture that embraces all people.
African Americans and other non-whites can’t give up the fight. They have no choice but to oppose DeSantis, Trump, and the rest on the streets, in the courts, in the voting booth, despite concerted efforts by far-right Republicans to squelch any dissent.
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Dead school kids are the price of Hegseth's 'losers' bluster
If we’re not better than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, we’re in terrible trouble.
War always means innocent people dying. But civilized nations try — imperfectly, too often unsuccessfully — to limit that risk. That’s why rules of engagement exist in the first place. They are not about political correctness or bureaucratic caution. They are about preventing needless death.
Hegseth has spent years ridiculing that idea.
Long before he became Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Hegseth built a career attacking the very guardrails meant to keep wars from sliding into indiscriminate violence. As a Fox News personality and conservative activist, he mocked military lawyers who insisted on verifying targets before pulling the trigger. He sneered at the notion that American commanders should exercise caution when civilians might be nearby. He called those rules “stupid.”
Once in power at the Pentagon, he moved quickly to dismantle the culture that produced them.
Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocates general and shuttered Pentagon offices tasked with reducing civilian casualties. He framed the changes as part of a new “warrior ethos” — a phrase that sounded less like professional military doctrine than something ripped from a locker-room speech.
When the war with Iran began, he boasted that American forces were operating with what he proudly described as “maximum authorities.” No more of the supposedly timid constraints of past conflicts. No more hesitation.
“Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” he said at one briefing.
Those words now hang over the ruins of an elementary school in the Iranian port city of Minab.
According to preliminary findings reported this week, a U.S. strike aimed at an adjacent naval installation likely destroyed the school building, killing roughly 175 civilians, most of them children. Officials familiar with the investigation say the target list relied on outdated intelligence. The school had once been part of the military base years earlier, but had long since been converted to civilian use.
It appears the strike planners simply didn’t double-check.
In the old Pentagon culture Hegseth spent years mocking, double-checking was exactly the point.
The rules he derided existed for reasons that went beyond humanitarian concern. Civilian deaths inflame local populations, alienate allies and create more enemies than they eliminate. Every experienced military commander understands this. It is both a moral obligation and a strategic necessity.
Hegseth, a despicable lout whose moral compass was shattered long ago—if he ever had one—sneers at all that as weakness.
Even before entering government, his public life was defined by conduct that suggested a man who mocked rules — legal, ethical, or otherwise — as inconveniences that applied to other people.
A woman told Monterey, California police in 2017 that after a Republican women’s conference where Hegseth was the keynote speaker, he took her phone, blocked his hotel room door with his body, and sexually assaulted her despite, in her words, saying “no” repeatedly. She went to a hospital, underwent a rape kit exam, and handed her clothing to investigators. No charges were filed, but Hegseth later paid his accuser $50,000 in a confidential settlement. His explanation: he feared what the allegation might do to his Fox News career.
That’s what he told senators, under oath. But despite that and a litany of other horror stories presented by people who knew the real Hegseth, he was confirmed because the Republican majority of the United States Senate wasn’t going to challenge Donald Trump on issues of personal morality.
So today, this depraved man commands the most powerful military force on earth. Should it come as a surprise that he has dismantled every institutional check he can find that was designed to prevent mistakes?
Hegseth is every bit as vile as his recently fired Cabinet colleague, Kristi Noem. But unless he personally wounds Trump’s psyche with an ad campaign, there’s little reason to hope that he’ll meet the same fate.
It’s naive to bemoan that Hegseth doesn’t care about body counts. It’s why he has the job.
His position demands seriousness, restraint, and respect for the traditions of a professional officer corps that has spent generations learning the hard lessons of war. It requires someone who understands that American power is not measured by how eagerly we unleash it.
Instead, it is now held by a man who treated the laws of war as punchlines long before he had the authority to bend them.
At least 150 children are dead in Minab. Their families do not care whether the missile strike was technically legal, whether the intelligence file was outdated, or whether the final investigation assigns blame.
And if we don’t care either, shame on us.
Our current government conflates caution with cowardice. Pete Hegseth called that attitude strength.
History will call it something else.
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This barbaric idea has got to be too depraved even for Trump — right?
Trump’s aggression in Iran keeps triggering feelings I’d rather not have. They’re complicated, overwhelming, and, at times, conflicting.
I don’t disagree with disarming a terrorist state on the cusp of nuclear arms; that seems like a common-sense, preserve-the-planet objective. I also don’t mind spending tax dollars to help desperate Iranians cast off religious rule; their brutal oppression has caught in my throat for years. When that 22-year-old was beaten to death for not covering her hair a while back I thought, wow, this is it. Finally. She will be the catalyst, the inflection point where Iranians rise up and smack down roving bands of morality police who enjoy punching girls. I mean, the center can’t hold where a bunch of religious men get to kill women for their lack of religiosity or personal choices, right?
Wrong. Iranians didn’t revolt. But neither did we. The Dobbs decision is over four years old and now pregnant women in red states are dying at twice the rate as women in blue states. What’s a little femicide among friends, amarite?
Same as it ever was
Those not-entirely-false equivalencies aside, Trump’s rotating justifications on Iran, and his obvious lack of concern for what comes next, cause high blood pressure. His side-ape’s messaging on “death and destruction” doesn’t impress either, it just confirms that humans haven’t really evolved since Homo erectus. Stone clubs or Tomahawks, what’s the difference when it comes to brute force meted out by morons?
Please, if there is a god, can I just sleep for the next 5,000 years and come back when people know how to live in peace and preserve their only home?
Anguish over Gaza feels much the same. Who benefits from reducing an already poor nation to rubble, other than munitions dealers and developers? When Gazans’ plight—starving, thirsty—is in the news, I can’t take a drink of water in the night without internalizing their depth of thirst. If I were dehydrated, sleeping under a tarp, and my children and mule were also parched, how would I split a cup of water? Would I give it all to one child in hopes one of us would survive? Or would I divide it among all of us, two tablespoons each, just to share the life-affirming, if fleeting, joy of wetness on our tongues?
Are we back to an eye for an eye?
Hamas terrorists are inhuman. Who or what made them that way is a question for another day, but what they did to innocent Israelis dancing under the stars in 2023 justifies their erasure from the planet, no further questions.
But who thinks a thousand eyes for an eye is morally just? Who, other than an unpopular criminal politician using war as a deflection, offers up 70,000 lives as sacrificial lambs just to keep himself in power? Don’t answer that. I’m aware that we have our own psychopath in charge. So it’s not moral superiority I feel, it’s grief for the human condition. Grief, and more than a little disgust.
Bibi, with Trump’s help, reduced Gaza to a dystopian nightmare, an uninhabitable hellhole where 2 million people used to live. Now they have nowhere else to go and what, we just move over a thousand miles to Iran and do it again?
I feel guilty for looking away to write this self-indulgent essay, but when I opened today’s NYT video of parents sobbing outside the school we bombed, killing over 150 children, I broke down. I mean, I lost it. Those could be my parents crying for their dead children. That could be my little boy buried in mortar, crying for me as he takes his last breath. Mostly, I’m choked with shame. This is my country doing this horrible thing to Iranian people who have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to harm me.
Don’t blame Iranians for their leaders unless you want to be blamed for Trump
I keep reminding myself that Iranians are no more responsible for their leaders than I am responsible for Trump, but in truth, compared to Americans, Iranians are far less responsible for their leaders than we are.
Iranians have been ruled by armed religious freaks since the Islamic Revolution which we caused by imposing the last shah, whom everyone hated. American hubris and oil greed led to Iran’s theocratic regime 47 years ago, and Iranians have been brutalized under Sharia law ever since. When I hear Christian Nationalists promote theocracy in the U.S. I want to slap them: they have no clue what the Establishment Clause has done for our country, or for them.
Thanks to theocracy, Iranians now live under roving patrols of armed thugs. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command terrorist cells on every block, of every city, of every district in Iran. Expecting unarmed citizens to challenge them is worse than ignorant, it’s ghoulish.
We are no better
Compared to what Iranians have had shoved down their throats, Americans look like idiots for electing an imbecile criminal. Any American with a TV saw what happened on J6, confirming that Trump will do anything for power, and we still re-elected him. Now we, too, have roving bands of armed paramilitary creeps driving around with guns. What does that say about us??
I’ve read political essays and credible analysts who say Trump's plan in Iran is to provoke another 9-11, so he can expand presidential powers in the name of national security to stay in power. That’s more than my head can take today, so I’ll conclude with one certainty: Iranians’ culpability for their horrid rulers is not equal to Americans’ culpability for Trump. It’s not fair to blame them, even though Death to America jihadists will blame all Americans for Trump’s barbarism. The world is unfair like that.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.
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Trump is cornered
Trump is cornered.
Iran’s missiles, drones, and nuclear facilities have been severely hobbled, but its regime is still standing. Many of its senior political, military, and intelligence leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard survives.
Iran’s new supreme leader, in his first official message since he took over from his slain father, says Iran will continue to block the Strait of Hormuz by bombarding tankers trying to get through.
The closure has caused “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” according to the International Energy Agency. Oil has reached $100 a barrel, gas at the pump has risen almost 20 percent since the war began, and the stock market continues to slide. Higher oil prices are also raising the costs of food, medicine, electricity, and airline tickets.
Trump knows all this could deliver Congress to the Democrats in the midterms. So — with the Strait of Hormuz blocked and Iran’s new regime sounding more belligerent than ever — what does he do now?
Here are the four options:
1. He declares victory and exits the Middle East within a few days, even though the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked — hoping that Iran will unblock it to sell its own oil.
This poses a high political risk for Trump. Most Americans were against the war to begin with. If fuel prices stay high and Trump has little to show for his war, he and Republicans are almost sure to be penalized brutally in the midterms.
2. He unblocks the Strait of Hormuz with American warships escorting oil tankers, then he declares victory and gets out.
This is militarily risky. The Pentagon has been turning down requests to escort tankers through the strait, saying the threat to American warships from Iranian bombardment is too high. So, trying to open the strait now risks the deaths of more U.S. service members.
3. He spends the next two weeks trying to decimate what’s left of Iran’s missile and drone capacities and its navy, in the hope that everything will return to normal after Iran is neutered. Then he declares victory and gets out.
This is risky in a different way. Iran has shown remarkable resilience in maintaining its missile and drone offenses even as the U.S. and Israel have destroyed much of them. If Trump declares victory and Iran’s belligerence continues notwithstanding, fuel prices could remain high and the “victory” will be shown to be a sham. The worst of all worlds for Trump.
4. He gets Russia, Venezuela, and oil producer allies in the Middle East to dramatically increase production, in hopes this will reduce oil prices and contain the slide of the U.S. stock market.
This will be very hard to do. OPEC’s surplus capacity is limited. Venezuelan production is also limited; even if U.S. oil companies dramatically increased their investment there, it would take many months to boost output. Russia is selling its oil to China and India. Even with additional supplies, the Department of Energy warns that gas prices are unlikely to recede to prewar levels until mid-2027.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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This grotesque war lust exposes the truth about Lindsey Graham
Once upon a time, America, albeit for a millisecond, saw South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham strap on a pair and condemn the tyranny of Donald Trump.
On the night of January 6, 2021, hours after a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol at Trump’s behest, Graham took to the Senate floor to deliver a rebuke of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“Count me out!” he thundered. “Enough is enough!” he roared. And most of us said, “Was that Lindsey Graham?” Two days later, he spent four hours with Trump and soon after was calling fellow senators to urge them not to impeach.
The rest, they say, is history, and in this case, speculation that Trump knows something about Graham’s history or has something on him that keeps the lapdog South Carolina senator barking on his behalf. That conjecture, of course, is that Trump has a hold on Graham’s voters.
That said, there’s something deeply strange about Graham and his vicious fits of outbursts around the war with Iran that beg the question, “Why are you so angry, Lindsey?”
Since the United States launched military strikes against Iran, the senior senator from South Carolina has been practically giddy, like a boy who fawns over the muscles and ruggedness of his G.I. Joe doll.
Graham has been popping up everywhere, i.e., Fox News, press conferences, television studios, and Sean Hannity’s podcast, radiating a kind of frantic, over-the-top machismo that is rivaling the “warrior ethos” of Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth.
Graham has declared the war the “most significant thing that’s happened in the Mideast in a thousand years.” I guess the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War I was just a dust storm?
He called Iran’s leadership “religious Nazis” and compared the conflict to a “21st Century Berlin Wall moment.” Is he comparing Ronald Reagan’s soaring words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” to Trump’s taunting, “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags?”
He told Fox News the U.S. is going to “make a ton of money” once the Iranian regime falls, because apparently we’re treating the destruction of a nation and the possible humanitarian crisis of displacing 90 million people as a cash cow.
The war costs an estimated $1 billion per day, we’re told. Graham has essentially been touting it as money well spent and a good investment. Sure sounds like America First. To him, it’s better than helping those who lost their health insurance or face sky-high premiums with their bills.
Then, casually, he mentioned he’d be going back to South Carolina to ask constituents to “send their sons and daughters” to the Middle East.
Someone else’s sons and daughters. Never his own, because he doesn’t have any children, and he has absolutely no earthly idea what a horror it is for parents to send their children into a war, especially one that was started for no good reason.
This is Graham’s usual pathetic posturing. He’s a man who has spent decades desperately wanting to be perceived as something he is not. While Hegseth talks tough and aggressively, motor-mouthing lethal force, Graham seems to have found his own real-life G.I. Joe doll to slather over.
But why?
Graham has been in Washington since 1995 and cultivated a reputation as a foreign policy hawk, primarily as the late Senator John McCain’s moderate sidekick. Palling around with the manly McCain, who actually fought, was wounded and imprisoned in a war, made Graham feel like a Beltway tough guy. The man who would ostensibly bomb anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Graham was all about “warrior ethos” before there was such a thing as “warrior ethos.”
The transformation from the occasional voice of Senate moderation to full-throated, whacked-out warmonger was complete somewhere around 2016, and it has only accelerated since. The more Trump screws up, the more Graham “man’s up” for Trump.
What’s revealing isn’t just what Graham says; it’s also how he operates. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal detailed how Graham worked behind the scenes to drag a reluctant Trump into this war.
According to the reporting, he coached Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to pitch Trump, specifically how to appeal to him by telling the stable genius how he could “make history.” Graham started lobbying Trump on the golf course shortly after the 2024 election, arguing that obliterating Iran’s nuclear facilities was the president’s “moment to shine.”
The Journal also reported that he coordinated a media campaign with retired General Jack Keane and columnist Marc Thiessen, designing television appearances and op-eds to capture Trump’s attention and make, as reports describe it, the “bait irresistible.”
When it comes to being “irresistible,” Graham apparently hasn’t learned how to do the same in his personal life. But I digress.
Graham also admitted to visiting Israel to meet with intelligence officials, boasting that “they’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” which he then used to strengthen his case to the White House.
Mmm, one wonders how the story of a heroic and conquering Graham, who secret agents confide in with their biggest state secrets, ended up as front-page news in the Wall Street Journal?
Oh, what the wildly insecure, emasculated Lindsey Graham wouldn’t do to feel important and be one of the boys.
Why, Lindsey, do you need this so badly?
The man represents a state with 5.3 million people, a state with real problems: poverty, healthcare access, crumbling infrastructure.
Instead, he’s out playing war-mongering warlord, channeling his inner G.I. Joe on Fox News, asking other people’s children to bleed in the desert while he licks his chapped lips about the investment returns of death and destruction.
It’s all the fantasies of a lonely, double-chinned old man who wants so badly to be treated like a man by hobnobbing with the young, chiseled jaws of military might.
Lindsey Graham wants to be seen as a war hawk because he thinks it makes him look powerful. What it actually makes him look like is someone who has never quite grown up, still playing with his G.I. Joe doll, only this time doing so by putting other people’s precious lives at risk.
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Trump's idiot just gave a massive gift to jihadi recruiters
Two weeks in, the Trump administration continues to give conflicting assessments on Iran. Contradicting himself repeatedly in the span of hours, Donald Trump claimed on Monday the war was “very complete.” That calmed the markets. Later that afternoon, the Department of Defense said the opposite, posting on X that the U.S. had “only just begun to fight,” and promising “no mercy” from Secretary Pete Hegseth’s non- politically correct, rules-eschewing “lethality warriors.”
Aside from fueling the scary impression that children are in charge of the arsenal, Hegseth’s continuing obsession with lethality blunts any strategic objectives the war was supposed to serve, not that those have ever been clear. The only certainty is that Trump, who doesn’t care about polls, does care about the price of oil. Once it passed $120 a barrel, a flashing red light to economists, Trump stopped chest thumping long enough to focus on keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, describing the war as “limited” to cushion the financial fallout from his own poor judgment.
It’s too early to know whether the potential nightmare scenario — closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran controls — will happen, pushing oil prices high enough to trigger a world recession. But while Hegseth continues to strut like a rooster with an AK-47, recession is the least of our worries.
Lethality over objectives
Hegseth says victory is all about lethality, or killing the enemy. It’s like watching a caveman trying to play chess.
Long-term geopolitical success requires achieving realistic and sustainable political objectives at a reasonable cost. Neither Hegseth nor Trump comprehends that the U.S. did not lose in Iraq and Afghanistan because we lacked “lethality.” We lost because the objectives we sought were unattainable given political realities on the ground.
Those same political realities are rampant in Iran, including:
- Extreme sectarian and tribal divisions.
- Worsening fragmentation among ethnic minority groups like the Kurds, Baluchis, and Azeris.
- A growing humanitarian crisis, including insufficient water, that will trigger massive refugee movements and overwhelm regional resources.
- Ideological, religious paramilitary fighting forces like the Basij and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Trump’s focus on oil while Hegseth obsesses over lethality exposes the folly: They’ll never navigate geopolitical complexities they can’t understand.
A game until someone gets hurt
In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth complained that American troops are too wedded to rules.
“Modern war-fighters,” he urged, shouldn’t worry about rules of engagement. Instead, Hegseth counseled, “America should fight by its own rules.”
Hegseth’s own rules serve up death and destruction as entertainment. One official government account depicted the war in Iran with Call of Duty gameplay interspersed with real footage of Iranians being killed. As if war were a video game, the post showed a player racking up a string of kills. Another social media post interspersed clips from Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun with real kill-shot footage from Iran.
Hegseth may think he’s still a Fox News personality whose job is to turn tragedy into entertainment, but for serious military strategists, the messaging is appalling and dangerous.
Hegseth endangers Americans
Hegseth’s strutting displays of manosphere bluster may attract basement incels and Fox News viewers, but over the long haul, they are dangerous.
Gaining the upper hand on an enemy’s morale is a valid objective; it can be decisive in competitive contexts to create “a contagion of despair.” Napoleon Bonaparte said morale “is to the material as three is to one.” But you have to know your enemy first.
Trump and Hegseth don’t seem to understand that vast cultural differences sent us home from Iraq and Afghanistan with our tails between our legs. A fundamental ignorance of those societies led to U.S. failures in both wars — the U.S. never adapted to local dynamics, leading to increased insurgencies, alienation of the people, and the inability to build stable local governments.
Boots on the ground
Trump has said he is open to putting boots on the ground in Iran, which would mean our troops encountering Islamic fighters who sincerely believe that “death to Americans” will get them into heaven.
Iran’s primary military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), acts as an expeditionary force through its Quds Force, and manages a vast network of regional proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthis. The IRCG acts as the hub among Islamist militant groups throughout the Middle East, motivating terrorists who are violently opposed to the United States.
These Muslim forces believe “jihad,” or armed struggle, is the highest form of religious devotion, one that offers a guaranteed path to salvation and atonement, which the IRGC reinforces through steady indoctrination. The IRGC will likely use Hegseth’s rhetoric and video game posts as recruitment tools: Look how the Great Satan is slaughtering our children and laughing.
Hegseth’s videos will be useful to Iran as the IRGC exploits nationalistic and religious sentiments among terrorists. Iran will use Hegseth’s hubris against us, and the danger will not be limited to war zones. As we learned on 9/11, jihadist groups are the main perpetrators of suicide attacks worldwide. Hegseth is goading them into action.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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This gung-ho Trump thug thinks he's a bouncer — not a senator
Leadership is supposed to be calm, measured and disciplined.
Apparently no one told U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT).
Because what America saw on Capitol Hill earlier this was not leadership. It was a tackle.
A senator — a United States senator — launched himself into a physical scuffle like a substitute gym teacher breaking up a dodgeball riot.
This is the United States Senate, not a bar fight in Butte.
Three trained United States Capitol Police officers were handling the situation. That is their job. That’s what they’re trained for. That’s their responsibility.
They are taught to de-escalate, not to improvise joint-breaking techniques with help from an over-enthusiastic senator who wandered into the pile.
Yet here comes Sheehy, charging in, grabbing legs, and yanking arms.
And then — crack.
Congratulations, Senator. That is quite an achievement for a man whose official job description is “legislate.”
Let’s be clear: This wasn’t courage. It wasn’t heroism. It wasn’t leadership.
It was terrible judgment.
There were professionals in the room; people trained for exactly this situation.
Sheehy was not one of them.
But he jumped in anyway.
Because apparently the senator believed the Capitol Police needed backup from a part-time amateur wrestler.
The result?
A veteran ended up injured.
The protester, Brian McGinnis, is a Marine Corps veteran. He is a citizen, exercising his First Amendment rights.
You don’t have to agree with him.Most people probably don’t.
That is not the point.
The First Amendment protects speech we dislike. It protects speech we disagree with. It protects speech that annoys us. In fact, it especially protects speech that annoys us.
And yes, protests inside congressional buildings are illegal. Yes, the officers had every right to remove him. That’s why the officers were doing exactly that.
Sheehy later claimed he was trying to “de-escalate.”
De-escalate? By tackling someone? By pulling on limbs? By turning removal into a wrestling match? That word does not mean what he thinks it means.
De-escalation looks like restraint, distance, and control. It’s not grabbing a man while his arm is wrapped around a door frame. Even a first-year police trainee knows that’s how joints snap.
But apparently the senator skipped that lesson.
This is the deeper problem.
Power requires discipline. Public office demands judgment. The Capitol is not a playground for impulsive hero fantasies. Members of Congress are not auxiliary security guards. And they certainly should not be freelancing use-of-force decisions in crowded rooms.
Because when politicians start throwing their weight around — literally — people get hurt.
And this time someone did.
The irony here is painful: A Marine veteran — a man who served his country — was dragged out of a Senate hearing, his arm broken in the process. All while a United States senator decided he needed to play action hero.
There is an old line from Martin Luther King Jr. that still applies today: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”
Exactly.
Violence doesn’t solve protests. It doesn’t solve disagreements. It certainly doesn’t solve politics. What it does do is make things worse.
And it makes leaders look small.
Respect matters in a democracy. Respect for the law. Respect for trained professionals doing their job. Respect even for people shouting things we strongly disagree with.
Especially them.
Because if we only respect speech we like, we don’t really believe in freedom at all.
So here is the lesson Sen. Sheehy should have remembered before diving into that pile: Leadership means stepping back sometimes. It means letting professionals handle the problem.
Use judgment instead of muscle.
The Senate chamber is supposed to produce laws, not broken arms.
- Doug was born in Great Falls, Montana in 1957. He graduated from Charles M. Russell High School in Great Falls and then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History, with high honors, from Southern Methodist University in 1979. Doug earned his Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Montana in 1982. After graduating from law school, he worked for the Montana Securities Department in the State Auditor's Office from 1982-1984. He has been in private practice in Billings since 1984. Doug is married to Kathy Webster James.
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Trump reeling after this brave city dared expose his lies
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
On Jan. 7, I dropped a car off at my daughter’s high school. Not long after that, she took it to skiing practice. A few minutes later, then-Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino and at least 10 ICE agents stopped in front of the school and marched onto the property. According to people I know who were there, the agents were aggressive and belligerent. One woman blew a whistle, and an agent walked up to her and said, “You’re assaulting me.”
The grounds were filled with students and staff who’d come outside and who were recording the incident. In one video, as ICE swarmed the grounds, the school principal ran up to pull a student back from an agent, who then fired chemical irritants into both their faces. Another staff member can be heard telling students to back up.
“Guys,” she says, “I don’t want you to get hurt. They literally just killed someone.”
That someone was Renee Good, who had been killed earlier that day. The videos from outside our school showed how easily the number of people killed could have climbed.
But there were other reasons to be disturbed.
The next day, Bovino wrote on X that the students and staff were “organized protesters” who “showed up in minutes assaulting agents,” He said there were four arrests and that they “saw no students.”
It’s no secret that politicians, secret police and paramilitary squad leaders lie. But this was different: A brazen attempt to rewrite facts that we could all see with our own eyes.
To anyone who’s been paying attention, this feels familiar. Ever since his disappointing crowd size in 2016, Donald Trump has been trying to alter reality with his words.
A few examples stand out: The California wildfires that he said were caused by not raking the forests. Trump claiming to be named Michigan’s “Man Of the Year.” Trump’s statement in 2020 that COVID-19 was disappearing. His assertion that January 6th was “a day of love.” And his more recent claim that he won Minnesota three times.
If these all sound insane, it’s partly because they are. But it’s also partly because Trump has understood our dystopian moment better than the rest of us.
Lately I’ve seen this quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four making the rounds: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
When Orwell and others tried to imagine the worst iteration of government power, they pictured an all-powerful state that controlled an official narrative of events. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the government uses violence (or drugs in the case of Brave New World) to control our perception of reality. The fear was a paucity of possible narratives.
Today, the opposite is true: The number of narrative possibilities is infinite, so we can choose the one that “feels true,” regardless of its connection to reality. These stories don’t need to be fact-checked or verified. They just need to be shared by people you trust. The events in them matter less than the beliefs holding them together. And as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
Trump rose in this milieu. In our modern dystopia, orthodoxy has become self-selecting. Anyone who wants to belong more than they want to understand can parrot the party line. It doesn’t matter how true it is because, as Orwell also observed, “reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
Trump intuited this: He could say whatever he wanted to be true. This has been so effective among his supporters that it seems to have become official policy: Just say what you want to have been true, regardless of what was.
Two hours after Renee Good was killed, for example, Homeland Security issued a statement that called her a “violent rioter,” who had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.”
But when the observer videos came out, we all saw this was not true.
Two weeks later, Alex Pretti was tackled and shot 10 times. Afterward, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told the cameras: “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement.”
Again the observer videos showed the truth.
This happened over and over during Metro Surge. It was only thanks to the 30,000 trained observers in Minnesota that reality could not be so easily distorted: ICE was abusing our rights, kidnapping working people off the street and tearing families apart. They were targeting anyone with dark skin, along with whomever else they wanted to inflict violence and chaos on. It was a raw power trip, and no amount of words could cover it up.
But with observers present, the world could see what the Party told us not to see.
The surge wore on, the resistance continued and the mass-documentation started to have an effect. After ICE agents claimed they were attacked by a violent criminal with a snow shovel — who they claimed to have shot in self-defense — video evidence again contradicted the official story. DHS later admitted its narrative had collapsed, and that its agents were under investigation.
“The men and women of ICE are entrusted with upholding the rule of law and are held to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity, and ethical conduct” A DHS spokesperson said. “Violations of this sacred sworn oath will not be tolerated.”
This was a lie we didn’t need a video to disprove.
The larger point is this: Minnesota’s resistance to the ICE surge cracked the Trump reality bubble. The air started leaking out, and the truth in. Bovino was ousted, followed by Noem. This was because when they told us to reject the evidence in front of our eyes, we kept recording.
When all this is over, we will likely still be awash in a dystopic swirl of stories. But this may be the beginning of the end of Trump’s ability to assert whatever version of reality he wants. If so, it will be because we shone a light on the terrible truth. And in doing so, we gave everyone watching a rudder to help steer our ship out of these dangerous waters.
- Frank Bures is the editor of "Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology, author of Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories," and he writes and records for VoiceMap. He lives in Minneapolis and is one of the city’s constitutional observers. More at frankbures.com.
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A dizzying web points to who owns Trump and the depth of his treason
Eight of our American service members are dead and more than 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, airmen, and marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.
The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added:
“Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”
When asked about the reports, Donald Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer — basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him, Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service members:
“They’d say we do it against them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”
His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and who has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Vladimir Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC:
“I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”
Putin himself, though, was nowhere near as circumspect, saying:
“On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”
As if to confirm that Trump is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts of Russian oil directly to India.
Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump asks, “How high?”
Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against him?”
Is it possible that Trump is actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least 2017?
That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).
And let’s not forget that right after Trump won re-election in November 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?
Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).
That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.
But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?
From Russian oligarchs laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?
Or perhaps blackmailing him?
What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Jeffrey Epstein’s videos of Trump with underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of his beauty pageants?
Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for the next three years of this second term?
And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?
In 2019 the Washington Post revealed that throughout his last presidency, Trump was having regular secret phone conversations with Putin (more than 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).
The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.
The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.
Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed help.
Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.
As the New York Times noted in 2020:
“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. [Konstantin] Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”
There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.
The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.
Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?
Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.
“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” the Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”
When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.
The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Manafort, asking FBI Director James Comey to “go easy” on Gen. Michael Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.
As the Mueller Report noted:
“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”
It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:
“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.
And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.
In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.
The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.
That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.
As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):
“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.
“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”
The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.
Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.
The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:
“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”
Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.
Sen. Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:
“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”
Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.
In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.
In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.
As the Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:
“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”
On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.
The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
But the following week, on Aug. 2, the Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, the New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:
“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.
“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”
And now, to complicate matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, the Wall Street Journal reports, has also reportedly been having his own secret conversations with Putin.
If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?
Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.
Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.
As 2016 and 2018 investigations by the Guardian found:
“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”
An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, D.C. for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.
Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.
The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.
Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He then purchased a large ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe on Sept. 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.
Trump’s ad laid it on the line:
“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”
As the Guardian reported in 2021:
“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.
“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”
Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Putin ever since that US election year.
In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off Gen. Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.
Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.
From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”
The big question is, “Why?”
- 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 knows this damning truth will sink him no matter how many bombs he drops
The Iran war has been raging for nearly two weeks but it hasn’t yet managed to bomb the Epstein Files out of existence — to the enormous regret of a lot of people in Trumpworld.
Yes, those documents are still around, and people like me have no intention of shutting up about them. Ever.
Let’s take a quick look at all the things the Epstein Files are not:
- They are not a hoax.
- They are not disproven.
- They are not fully released.
- They have not been significantly investigated.
Oh yeah, one other thing: Trump has not come close to being “completely exonerated” no matter how intensely he or his toadies may claim it. In fact, the opposite is true.
Trump’s Department of Injustice has done everything in its power to hide the documents that matter most when it comes to Trump’s complicity with Jeffrey Epstein, explaining them away most recently by claiming, “Oh sorry, we failed to include them in the files release because we mistakenly thought they were duplicates.”
Funny how there were no such errors when it came to mentions of Bill Clinton or anyone else. It tracks with everything contended so far, in arguing against the most likely scenario to be the most plausible one.
More people need to acknowledge that a man publicly accused of sexual misconduct by at least 28 women over decades, found liable for sexual abuse in a department store dressing room, and exposed as a serial liar should reasonably be suspected of joining a man known to have been his best friend — who died a convicted sex offender arrested on new charges — in the sexual assault of underage girls.
Why would women who have nothing to gain and much to lose risk everything — including perpetual harassment, character assassination, and threats of bodily harm to themselves and to family members — to concoct untrue stories about abusive, illegal, and immoral behavior of a man long known to have no self-control or decency?
We are instead asked by Trump and his minions to turn off 99 percent of our brains and believe him.
The internal battle that MAGA fanatics fight to convince themselves Trump is telling the truth despite all conceivable evidence to the contrary must be incredibly fierce. It seems they have no choice but to believe him. Otherwise, their entire life view would be proven fraudulent.
There has to be something to the thousands of mentions of Trump in these files. Otherwise, the DOJ wouldn’t be working so hard to disappear and/or discredit them. Common sense says you don’t try to hide papers that absolve you, only ones that expose your duplicity.
The official explanation is always some version of care and caution surrounding the identity of the girls, now women, named throughout the files. Except that the women almost without exception welcome the files’ exposure and scream for more.
The idea that anyone associated with Trump gives the slightest whit about these women is utterly farcical. They’ve proven over and over that this is a game of Whac-A-Mole, Trump’s every waking moment consumed with staying a step ahead of the game.
It’s all about delaying, obscuring and deflecting, so there is never any accountability and we all forget and move on. Yet no doubt to the amazement of Trump, we’re still here, demanding answers and justice. For the first time in his disgraceful life, running and hiding isn’t working. He stomped his feet to make it vanish, and it didn’t.
The reason is that there are people on both sides of the political divide who don’t want their president to be a predator. Or at least, if the president is a marauding deviant who treats women and girls as pieces of meat placed on earth for his own genitalia-grabbing amusement, they had better hold the cost of groceries and gas low and keep us out of wars.
So much for that.
Now it’s clear Trump has never even tried to keep a promise, the torch-bearing villagers are at the gate. But we’re also finding that isn’t quite enough. It’s time for Republicans in Congress to grow a spine. If not, liability will stay out of reach.
We all know Trump should be nowhere near the highest office in the land but in a prison cell instead. But too many have relegated themselves to pretending that the overwhelmingly obvious is somehow impossible to consider.
I won’t recount the innumerable examples of Trump’s likely guilt embedded in Epstein’s papers, photos, and videos, even among documents the DOJ has released. There simply isn't space.
But there is one story that needs to be pointed out again and again: the claim from the woman interviewed repeatedly by the FBI in 2019, who said she was introduced to Trump sometime between 1983 and 1985, when she was between 13 and 15 years old.
The woman alleged that Trump forced her to perform oral sex on him, but she allegedly “bit Trump’s penis because he disgusted her.”
The woman said Trump responded by pulling her hair, punching her in the side of the head, and saying, “Get this little bitch the hell out of here!”
The woman told the FBI that years of harassment, intimidation, and threats followed, including twice being run off the road.
Before dismissing this uncorroborated claim, I ask: do you honestly not believe Trump is capable of this kind of behavior?
The answer is key to everything.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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