Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s known to have raped 13-year-old girls. He made a shocking joke in the White House yesterday, speaking with the Prime Minister of Japan, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him.

The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.

Our country has been poisoned for decades now, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken around 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis.

First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.

Back in 1971, Lewis Powell thought he saw a communist threat in Ralph Nader. Literally: he named him in his infamous manifesto, the Powell Memo, arguing that calls to regulate auto safety with seat belts and soft dash boards (Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed) were simply the first steps toward a socialist takeover of America.

“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business,” Powell wrote, “is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”

Nader (who wrote the Foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream) and people like Rachel Carson, with the environmental movement her book Silent Spring had inspired, threatened, Powell believed, the core of America’s free enterprise system.

Regulation, Powell (a tobacco lawyer) asserted, was just step one to a total Stalinist takeover of America.

“The overriding first need,” Powell wrote, “is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that claimed billionaire and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: it was speech.

That decision greased the path for the later doubling down with Citizens United, and produced a tsunami of corporate money that flooded into the GOP in 1980 (at the time the Democrats were largely funded by labor unions; their embrace of corporate money would come in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats”), floating Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal Reagan Revolution into power.

Since then, big business and billionaires have discovered that the investment of a few million dollars into buying politicians can produce billions or even trillions in returns. When morbidly rich hedge fund guys poured a million or so dollars into Kirsten Sinema’s coffers, for example, she demanded changes to the Inflation Reduction Act that saved them fourteen billion.

That’s one hell of a return on investment, and similar deals are made every day now: the entire GOP and the “corporate problem solver” Democrats are all in on the scam.

Whether it’s money from fossil fuel, big pharma, big chemical, big banking, big airlines, big telcom, big tech, or any other billion-dollar industry in America, the entire GOP and a handful of those “problem solver” Democrats in the House and Senate have their hands out. Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.

Next came poisonous memes designed to turn working people against each other.

The morbidly rich, and the corporations that made them that way, hate labor unions, aka “democracy in the workplace.” Unions reduce their profits and inhibit their ability to maximally exploit their workers; unionized workers also demand accountability, a word anathema to corporations.

Reagan promoted the idea that “union bosses” were exploiting union members for their own advantage and, even though the argument made no sense (unions don’t have stock or bonus systems like corporations, so “union bosses” get a salary just like everybody else), it was picked up by the media that was, itself, run by corporations unhappy about being unionized.

TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s routinely featured corrupt or mobbed-up “union bosses” as parts of their plots, while state after state adopted “Right To Work For Less” legislation, authorized by a Republican Congress over Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, that makes it difficult for unions to survive.

Right-wing radio and Fox “News” echoed the message, and, since Reagan’s election, we’ve seen union representation go from about a third of all Americans to around 10 percent in the private workplace today.

Along with the poisoning death of our unions came the destruction of the American middle class. When Reagan came into office some estimates put the middle class — a single family’s wage-earner being able to buy a home, a car, take a vacation, put kids through school, and save for retirement or have a pension — at around 60 to 65 percent of American families. Today it’s under 45 percent.

Conservatives then set about poisoning American race relations.

This is not to say everything was hunky dory, but in the 1960s and 1970s we were making real progress. Politicians from both parties — with the broad support of the American people — passed Voting- and Civil Rights laws, we made good faith efforts to integrate schools and workplaces, and even television shows in the 1990s, led by Norman Lear’s genius, brought positive portrayals of non-white and queer people to straight white people’s TV screens in a big way for the first time.

First came Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” openly welcoming southern white racists into the GOP. Next, tragically, in 1988 George HW Bush proved that appealing to white racism could still win elections with his notorious Willie Horton ads, setting the stage for two generations of race-baiting Republican politics that reached its zenith with Donald Trump’s racist declaration about “Mexican rapists” when he announced his candidacy in 2015.

The GOP continues this strategy today, promoting racial and religious fear and hate with Muslim bans and ICE raids, generating hysteria about Brown refugees and fighting to block any true portrayals of American racial history in our schools.

Hustlers, with help from the GOP, poisoned Christianity next.

Reagan’s campaign hired born-again alcoholic George W. Bush to work out a deal to integrate the evangelical movement — which prior to 1980 was non-political and even supported abortion rights — into the GOP.  Jerry Falwell became the face of this church-and-state merger, spewing his own brand of poison.

The week after 9/11, Falwell and Pat Robertson solemnly agreed on TV that the attack on the Twin Towers was merely their god’s punishment for America tolerating “sin.”

“What we saw on Tuesday,” Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s TV show, “as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

Robertson replied:

“Jerry, that’s my feeling. I think we’ve just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven’t even begun to see what they can do to the major population.”

Falwell then doubled-down:

“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Robertson, nodding vigorously, added:

“I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”

And now we have evangelists like the newly reinvented Mike Flynn — a convicted and pardoned secret foreign agent who spied on us from within the White House — traveling the country today calling, essentially, for replacing our democracy with an authoritarian “Christian” government like in Russia and Hungary (and Germany and Italy in the past).

“If we are going to have one nation under God,” Flynn tells audiences repeatedly, “which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God, right?”

Forget about the teachings of Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Goats and Sheep in Matthew 25; get yourself an AR-15 like Flynn recently strutted with on-stage. And let’s do something about all those Jews and Muslims, like Nick Fuentes recommends!

The NRA and weapons manufacturers then poured the poison of guns across our land.

Using the money Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, combined with Scalia’s twisted Heller decision, the Supreme Court and the NRA have unleashed an epidemic of gun violence in America.

The average of all countries in the world is 9.86 guns per 100 civilians.  The United States is highest in the world at 120.5 guns per 100 people. Yemen, which is in the middle of a war with Saudi Arabia and dealing with an internal insurgency, comes in second at 52.8.

No other nation is even close; even Afghanistan and Iraq average around 20 deadly weapons in the hands of every hundred people. European and Asian countries range from 10 to as low as 1 gun per hundred people.

Over on Fox “News,” one brilliant idea to deal with the slaughter of our children in our schools was to issue “Ballistic Blankets” to every school. This is how sick and twisted the Republicans taking money from the gun industry and their allies have become.

Twenty years ago, car accidents were the leading killer of children and youth: today it’s guns. This year, almost 11 out of every 100,000 children died from guns while only 8 per 100K died from car crashes. Nothing in America kills more of our children than the 400,000,000+ guns in which our country is awash (and that have made billions for the weapons industry).

White Supremacists are doing their best to poison our police and military.

There’s an active movement among white supremacist groups to spread the poison of fascism, racism, and hate to the government employees who carry the authority to legally kill people. As ABC News reported last March:

“Based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, agents and analysts with the FBI’s division in San Antonio concluded that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists would ‘very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of’ their ideologies, according to a confidential intelligence assessment issued late last month.’”

And the epicenter for this appears to be Stephen Miller’s ICE.

“Semi-Fascist” MAGA Republicans are poisoning our system of governance.  

Former President Biden rightly called out the MAGA faction of the Republican Party; they are actively working to undermine our republic and replace it with their beloved autocratic strongman models of Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Putin’s Russia. They’re even promoting Hungary and Orbán on Fox “News,” doing fawning specials live from Budapest featuring the Big Man himself.

In multiple Republican-controlled states, legislators have made it harder to vote — particularly for low-income people, minorities, and college students — while openly working to terrorize Black voters. Ron DeSantis paraded a group of mostly Black “illegal voters” in Florida, while Texas politicians have promoted far and wide their arrests of Black “felon voters.”

It’s all about trying to terrify Black people away from the polls, if less severe efforts like outlawing “Souls to the Polls” by ending Sunday voting aren’t enough to swing elections to the GOP.

The Brennan Center documents how:

“As of Janu­ary 14, legis­lat­ors in at least 27 states have intro­duced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrict­ive [voting] provi­sions.”

Dozens are now law, and next is their SAVE America Act, which they don’t expect will pass but they will point to when Democrats win this coming November, claiming those victories were the result of fraud.

Meanwhile, Republican appointees on the Supreme Court let Republican secretaries of state cancel the voter registrations of over 20 million Americans in the last dozen years with their Ohio decision.

The Supreme Court has also allowed Republican secretaries of state to reduce the number of voting machines and voting locations, particularly in Black, Hispanic and college town neighborhoods, to force people wanting to vote into long, discouraging lines.

And they’re poisoning our social and news media.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”

As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:

“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money and more power.”

Today CNN is about to be taken over by a hard-right nepo-baby billionaire just like CBS and TikTok. There’s a network of “nearly 1300” websites purporting to be those of local newspapers but that are really rightwing propaganda operations, and dozens of actual rightwing “local” newspapers that are often stuck for free in people’s mailboxes.

Putin, Trump, Orbán, Xi, and other autocrats and rightwing billionaires are trying to poison democracies worldwide.

Donald Trump famously embraced autocrats, dictators, sheiks, and killers while snubbing leaders of democracies and working to destroy NATO and the United Nations. His family has taken in billions from the Middle East as he pursues a war against Iran that Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have lobbied American presidents to undertake for over a generation.

Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese intelligence services run disinformation campaigns that fill social media with lies and information designed to tear democracies apart; they’re having considerable success in their efforts, including putting Trump in the White House in 2016 and 2024, and pushing through Brexit.

Republicans in Congress are even openly opposing Ukraine in that nation’s valiant battle against Russia’s terror campaign: most recently it was 11 Republican Senators and 57 Republican members of the House who proudly voted with Putin over America and Ukraine.

Rand Paul, who secretly carried a stash of documents (from Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom?) to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump to hand-deliver to Putin’s intelligence service, even argued that we should end the Espionage Act, while his Republican colleagues were demanding Congress defund the FBI.

This November we can deliver the antidote to all this GOP poison.

This isn’t the first time “conservative” racists and fascists have poisoned America.

The oligarchs of the Confederacy did it in the first half of the 19th century, and progressive President Abraham Lincoln defeated them in the Civil War.

And the first third of the 20th century was haunted by the rise of the Klan and the Republican Great Depression, until progressive President Franklin Roosevelt declared political war on them, saying, “[T]hey hate me, and I welcome their hatred!”

As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.

FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower — two Democrats and a Republican — renewed the faith of the American people in the government our Founders created and many died to give us.

They taught us that civic engagement — voting and participating in our political system — is the best antidote to fascist poison.

Forty-plus years of Reaganism, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.

Steps that Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats have fought tooth-and-nail in their service to spreading the fascist poison of giant monopolies and the morbidly rich. They profit from keeping working peoples’ wages and benefits low, exploiting student debt, and forcing our public schools into crisis with bizarre anti-DEI laws and book bans.

This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Fully sixty percent of Americans will have an “election denier” Trump-humping Republican on the ballot this November.

Time is short and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.

Double-check your voter registrations (they can be challenged by Republicans even in Blue states) and do everything you can to wake up friends and neighbors to this very real danger to our republic. And get out on the streets on the 28th for No Kings Day!

Trump knew how to get out of Vietnam; he can’t get out of Iran.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/u-attacked-iran-show-power-151200758.html

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is already lost for the United States. Even if Iran is militarily defeated, it is unlikely the United States’ political objectives will be achieved. And, on balance, the United States will come out weakened from this war.

President Trump’s biggest problem lies in his attempt to square an impossible circle: imposing regime change in Iran without committing ground troops. Trump understands that neither his MAGA base nor the U.S. public has any appetite for another prolonged ground war in the Middle East. But regime change from the air does not work for a 90 million-strong country that is four times the size of Iraq and has been preparing for this eventuality for decades. The United States is beleaguered by the paradox of a leadership wanting to reimpose its global might through coercion and hard power and a population fundamentally opposed to any war that entails a significant expenditure of U.S. lives.

Why Iran Is Harder to Break Than It Looks

 Despite all the talk of a downgraded Iran in the last two years, recent events have demonstrated the country’s capacity to resist. Iran’s resilience relies on a military and security architecture that is highly decentralized, with overlapping command structures between the regular armed forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Recent days have shown how thoroughly Iran has developed extensive contingency planning designed to ensure continuity even under sustained attack. Airstrikes on Iran’s leadership have been ineffective — possibly even counterproductive, given their radicalizing effect on pro-government sectors of the population and their triggering of predetermined war protocols.

Equally important, Iran’s strategy is built around asymmetric warfare and escalation management. Its arsenal of weapons and proxy networks allow it to reap chaos across the region while imposing high costs on its adversaries. Iranian drones and missiles are relatively cheap to produce, but shooting them down requires interceptors that cost as much as 200 times more — and are limited in supply.

This leaves Trump facing a strategic trap. He must choose between the political cost of failing to achieve his regime change objectives and the political cost of walking back on his domestic promise of no more forever wars. The only viable exit strategy is to manufacture the appearance of victory: declaring that the objectives have been met even when they clearly have not.

The Peace Deal That Was Sabotaged the Day Before the Attack

 Even if Trump manages to save face domestically, the war has already been lost at the international level — and the most damning evidence of that may be what happened the day before the bombs fell.

The first source of resentment is that the United States entered this war at Israel’s behest. Israel has been pushing for a decisive confrontation with Iran for years, against the repeated warnings of Washington’s other traditional partners in the Persian Gulf. Gulf states, organized in the Gulf Cooperation Council, opposed this war from the start — they understood that a major conflict with Iran would destabilize the entire region. They were not given prior notice of an attack meticulously planned with Israel. Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, was reflecting broadly felt regional sentiment when he told CNN: “This is Netanyahu’s war.”

This opposition led several states to support diplomatic efforts that were actively underway when the attack began. The day before the attack, Oman announced a breakthrough: Iran had agreed not to stockpile fissile material — a concession that went beyond anything Iran had agreed to in the 2015 JCPOA, which Trump had previously scuttled. “A peace deal is within our reach,” the Omani foreign minister said — before declaring the following day, once the strikes had begun: “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined.”

That agreement died on the runway. It is worth sitting with that fact.

How the War Is Fracturing U.S. Alliances in the Gulf

 The Gulf states’ second grievance is that this war has seriously jeopardized their own security. As a result of the U.S.-Israeli attack, Iran retaliated against installations in Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases. In the Gulf, Iranian drones and missiles have struck targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. There is rising anger in these countries that whereas the United States has done little to shield them from these strikes, it has done a great deal to protect Israel. This dynamic creates precisely the strategic outcome Iran has long sought: to erode the foundations of the U.S. security architecture in the Gulf. If trust between Washington and its Gulf partners weakens — potentially leading some states to eventually downgrade their security cooperation — that alone represents a significant strategic victory for Iran.

Bahrain did successfully lead a UN Security Council resolution condemning Iran for these strikes. But Gulf states’ hostility toward Iran is not the new development here. The new development is the regional resentment toward the United States — given that all parties knew Iran would likely attack its neighbors if Washington struck first.

The situation could deteriorate further if Washington, encouraged by Israel, chooses to double down on the total destruction of Iran rather than seek an exit strategy. Nobody in the region — except Israel — wants a prolonged war or the total collapse of the Iranian state. The specter of Libya’s failed state and Syria’s civil war still haunts the region. As a result, Iran’s neighbors mostly distrust the CIA’s renewed support for Kurdish militants, as well as growing talk of stoking Azeri, Baloch, and Arab nationalist movements.

Yet many of Trump’s domestic allies remain oblivious to these concerns. A good if baffling example of this deep-seated ignorance was Sen. Lindsey Graham’s recent threat to GCC states. “Get more involved as this fight is in their backyard… if not, consequences will follow” — captures the depth of that disconnect.

The Global Economic Fallout

 Beyond the Middle East, this war now threatens the entire global economy. Oil prices have surged as a result of the selective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the United States, gas prices have risen sharply, fueling fear among Republicans that a continued energy crisis could hurt them in the midterm elections. In parts of Asia, the impact is being felt not only in rising fuel and liquefied gas prices but in supply constraints — several countries in South and Southeast Asia are already experiencing energy rationing, resulting in shortened work weeks, business closures, and partial school shutdowns.

 Europe faces its own vulnerabilities. With the end of winter providing some relief, gas reserves nevertheless remain low. Russia has been quick to offer Europe an energy lifeline — which Europeans have so far rejected, determined to uphold their sanctions. Meanwhile, Washington first gave permission to India to purchase limited quantities of Russian oil, then removed sanctions on Russian oil altogether, albeit temporarily. Russia looks set to be among the war’s clearest beneficiaries.

China, highly dependent on Gulf oil imports, will also be forced to seek alternative energy sources — likely accelerating its reliance on Russian oil. But in the longer run, the war tilts the strategic balance decisively in Beijing’s favor. A protracted conflict consumes U.S. military resources globally, including in East Asia — the removal of the THAAD missile defense system from South Korea is an early example of that overreach.

The war will further erode Washington’s global prestige and deepen doubts among key allies about the reliability of U.S. leadership. China has spent years carefully nurturing its relations with Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia — and a net result of this war will be the consolidation of those ties. Some analysts have also argued that the energy shock could further accelerate a global transition toward renewables, raising global demand for Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries. Against the backdrop of U.S. military adventurism, China’s reputation for diplomacy and economic stability will continue to gain global appeal.

The Nuclear Paradox

 One of the great ironies of this war is that it marks the end of any significant deterrence of Iran — including on its nuclear program. If Iran survives the devastating destruction brought upon it, its appetite for a nuclear deterrent will have significantly increased. A likely consequence of this war, therefore, will be to accelerate the very threat it professed to avert.

Operation Epic Fury is increasingly looking like an epic fail. What began as an attempt to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of unrivaled U.S. military power is fast becoming one of the most consequential strategic miscalculations of this century — a pivotal moment in the steady erosion of U.S. hegemony.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard pointedly refused to say whether Iran presented an “imminent” nuclear threat to America before the U.S. launched its war, angering Democratic senators during an intelligence hearing on Wednesday.

“The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president,” Gabbard said during questioning from Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia.

The committee continued to press Gabbard over what the intelligence community concluded about Iran’s nuclear program before the war, given that a written version of her statement said Iran’s nuclear capabilities had been “obliterated” with “no efforts since” to rebuild after U.S. strikes last year.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” Gabbard said. “That is up to the president, based on the volume of information that he receives.”

Gabbard’s statements inspired a sharp response from Ossoff, who cut in and said, “It is precisely your responsibility to determine what consists of a threat to the United States.” He accused Gabbard of “evading a question because to provide a candid response to the committee would contradict a statement from the White House.”

In a White House statement announcing the beginning of the Iran campaign, the Trump administration said the attack was necessary to “eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.”

Since then, however, officials have offered shifting explanations for the war, including comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was planning an attack on the country, a strike that was sure to provoke Iranian attacks in response on U.S. interests.

The back-and-forth in Congress comes amid larger scrutiny of the Iran war.

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced this week he was resigning, writing in an open letter that he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” because Iran posed “no imminent threat to our nation.”

During the Senate hearing, CIA Director John Ratcliffe challenged Kent’s conclusion.

“The intelligence reflects the contrary,” Ratcliffe said.

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced this week he was resigning, writing in an open letter that he could not keep supporting the war because Iran posed ‘no imminent threat to our nation’

He added that “any fair-minded assessment” would show Iran posed a threat to the U.S. and called the intelligence leading up to the war “flawless.”

Lawmakers also questioned Gabbard about what President Trump had been briefed about the potential of the war to trigger a shutdown of the vital Strait of Hormuz, which has since taken place.

Gabbard told the panel there had “long been an assessment of the IC [intelligence community] that Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz as leverage,” but declined to discuss specific conversations with Trump.

Now that the war is ongoing, the Iranian regime appears to be “intact but largely degraded,” Gabbard said.

Outside of the Capitol, the administration was also on the defensive, with Vice President JD Vance telling an audience in Michigan the war-driven spike in gas prices will only be “temporary.”

Leading members of NATO have dismissed the Trump administration’s demands for assistance in reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

“It is not NATO’s war,” said a spokesperson for German chancellor Friedrich Merz this week. “NATO is an alliance to defend the alliance area. The United States did not consult us before this war, and so we believe this is not a matter for NATO or the German government.”

 

 

 

 

Got that??

For as long as I can remember, the National Rifle Association has told us that the purpose of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution is to guarantee there is an armed citizenry to defend the nation against tyranny.

Now we have a tyrant in the White House who has appointed a mob of little tyrants throughout the Executive Branch.

So — is it now time for armed citizens to rise up and remove the tyrant(s)?

Asking for a friend.

Just a couple things Trump actually said today — March 16, 2026

Awkward moment at Kennedy Center board meeting when Trump forces Speaker Johnson to talk about FL Rep. Neal Dunn’s illness.

Johnson: “I think it was a terminal diagnosis.”

Trump: “He would be dead by June.”

Johnson: “That wasn’t public, but yeah, okay.”

Trump on Iran: “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

—a few minutes later —

“I knew the Strait would be a weapon. I predicted it a long time ago. I predicted all of this stuff. I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I wrote it in a book.”

Trump: Cuba, it’s a beautiful island. Great weather. I will be having the honor of taking Cuba. Whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth

Trump’s full rant on Cuba: “I think Cuba, in its own way, tourism and everything else, it’s a beautiful island, great weather. They’re not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change, you know? They won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week. I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form, you know. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it — I can do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth.”

Trump on Venezuela: “The president has done a very good job. I get along with him really well.” (The president of Venezuela is a woman.)

82 yr-old asshole who was screwing his secretary on the office desk while his wife was in the cancer ward demands “thermonuclear detonations” to bypass the Strait of Hormuz

The former Speaker of the House shared the story to his 2.5 million followers on X with a quoted passage, which read: “Instead of fighting over a 21-mile-wide bottleneck forever, we cut a new channel through friendly territory. A dozen thermonuclear detonations and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.”

The problem is, it appears Gingrich didn’t know it was satire. ( an article by the ChinaTalk Substack on Sunday that proposed detonating thermonuclear bombs to open up a new lane, eliminating the need for the Strait of Hormuz. )

“The views expressed above do not necessarily represent those of anyone with brain cells,” a note at the bottom of the story read.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-suck-up-newt-gingrich-82-demands-war-goes-thermonuclear/

UPDATE ON THE HORMUZ COALITION (Mon, March 16):

🇫🇷 France: REJECTED
🇬🇧 UK: REJECTED
🇮🇹 Italy: REJECTED
🇪🇸 Spain: REJECTED
🇯🇵 Japan: REJECTED
🇳🇴 Norway: REJECTED
🇨🇦 Canada: REJECTED
🇦🇺 Australia: REJECTED
🇩🇪 Germany: REJECTED
🇨🇳 China: NO RESPONSE
🇳🇱 Netherlands: NO RESPONSE
🇰🇷 South Korea: NO CONFIRMATION

 

Tell me again:  Who wrote that book “The Art of the Deal?”

It is conventional wisdom that when presidents are unpopular, they can start a war to boost their public support. Trump’s war against Iran to improve his favorability ratings has backfired badly.

• He tempted fate by declaring that “We won. . . in the first hour, it was over.” He rejected potential support from allies, posting, “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
• One week later, Trump is begging, cajoling, and threatening allies he previously shunned and insulted, demanding they help the US reopen the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. Not surprisingly, their response has been non-committal.
• But it gets worse. The war is going so badly for the US that Trump is threatening media outlets with “Treason”—which can include the death penalty—for reporting truthfully on the war.

Trump is exuding fear and desperation, a fact that will only harden the resolve of Iran to maintain its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has few options: Expand the war dramatically by sending tens of thousands of US soldiers onto the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf or declare victory, cease hostilities, and hope that Iran acts rationally to protect its economic interests in a free-flowing global oil trade.

I discuss the details below, but here’s the point for those seeking to defeat Trump and his enablers. He is weak, desperate, and cornered. Now is the time to ratchet up the pressure through political protests larger than any ever seen in American history.

Trump is weak and desperate because he can see a blue wave swelling in the distance, a wave that will bring oversight, investigations, and impeachments. By maximizing pressure on Trump now, we can accelerate his decision to stop the political hemorrhaging by ceasing hostilities. We have seized the momentum; Trump is in retreat. Let’s press our advantage!

Trump begs and threatens US allies to help reopen Strait of Hormuz

In three separate communications over the weekend, Trump begged and threatened US allies to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In an interview with Financial Times, a press gaggle on Air Force One, and an unhinged rant on Truth Social, Trump demanded that the UK, Japan, South Korea, China, and NATO allies help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. See Financial Times, Donald Trump warns Nato faces ‘very bad future’ if allies fail to help US in Iran (Gift article, accessible to all.)

In his interview with the Financial Times, Trump said that NATO faces a “very bad” future if European nations did not assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. He said, in part,

We have a thing called NATO. We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us . . . But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us. Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them, but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.

Trump resorted to a “planted” story in the Wall Street Journal previewing an announcement this week about a “coalition” of nations that would commit naval vessels to escort ships through the Strait. See WSJ, Exclusive: Trump Administration Plans to Announce Coalition to Escort Ships Through Strait of Hormuz.

But the story planted in the WSJ made clear that the “coalition” was illusory by noting that the coalition members “were still discussing . . . whether those operations would begin before or after hostilities end.”

Two observations: If the alleged members of the coalition are “still discussing” the formation of the coalition, it doesn’t exist. And if the coalition comes into operation only “after hostilities end,” the coalition is a PR stunt.

The response to the Trump’s trial balloon of a global coation to provide escorts was decidedly negative. See The Guardian, Trump’s call for allied deployment to strait of Hormuz meets muted response | Strait of Hormuz.

For example, per the Guardian,

A senior Japanese politician told the news channel NHK TV that Japan would not rule out sending warships to the region to secure the shipping lane but said the threshold for doing so was “very high”.

The UK said it was considering sending “mine hunting drones,” which is a far cry from providing a “naval escort.”

France said it would not participate in any operations in the Gulf.

Germany’s foreign minister said he was “very sceptical that extending [existing naval deployments] to the Strait of Hormuz would provide greater security.”

China said it would work to strengthen “communication with relevant parties” in the Middle East.

Where does that leave Trump? The Strait of Hormuz is closed for the 17^th day, the largest shipping disruption since WWII. See Hormuz Crisis Dashboard — Real-Time Shipping Disruption Tracker. The closure is currently affecting 10% of oil tankers, with 100% of oil shippers suspending operations in the Persian Gulf. Trump is just beginning to understand the ramifications of trash-talking our allies for the last year. Having been dismissed and demeaned, they are in no hurry to help the US fix the crisis that Trump created.

 

Trump threatens the media to stop reporting truthfully on the war

As news of US casualties and equipment losses / damage mounts, the administration wants the media to stop reporting on those setbacks, instead focusing only on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chest-beating about the US military blowing things up.

Trump went on a truly epic rant on Truth Social, which I will not repeat. You can search for it if you want, but make yourself a cup of tea and get comfortable before you start reading it. The point is that Trump is furious that the news of his war with Iran is making him look bad. (It’s always about him.) If you want to read a short summary, see The Daily Beast, Trump demands death penalty for reporters in unhinged war rant.

Per the Daily Beast, Trump said, in part, that a story reported by the Wall Street Journal about damage to five US refueling aircraft was false. (One refueling aircraft was shot down, resulting in the loss of six lives of US crew members.) Trump wrote,

The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!

Brandon Carr, the chair of the FCC, was spotted at Mar-a-Lago shortly after Trump’s tirade. Immediately thereafter, Carr snapped to attention and threatened networks with revocation of their licenses for reporting negative stories about the war. See CNN, FCC chair threatens TV networks amid Iran war coverage — but his warning rings hollow.

CNN’s headline suggests that the FCC chair does not have unilateral authority to revoke licenses. That suggestion is correct.

The reaction to Carr’s threats was swift and negative. Even Republicans criticized Carr for acting like he was the agent of an authoritarian dictator. Senator Ron Johnson recognized that Carr’s threats were beyond the pale. See The Hill, Ron Johnson criticizes Brendan Carr’s broadcast threats.

Johnson said the following on a Fox News Sunday talk show:

I am a big supporter of the First Amendment. I do not like the heavy-handed government, no matter who is wielding it. … I would rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible. The federal government’s role is to protect our freedoms — protect our constitutional rights.

When you have lost Ron Johnson, the closest thing to a human fence post in GOP caucus in the Senate, you are losing bigly.

Trump failed to heed the warnings of advisors who were appointed to be “Yes” men. The escalating economic damage was foreseeable and foreseen. Trump is now attempting to blame others for the mess he created—including NATO, China, South Korea, and the media.

The tactic will not work. Trump owns everything about the war on Iran—any positive outcomes, as well as every negative outcome, including global economic shocks. Our task is to ensure that the American electorate understands that Trump started this war on his own and is responsible for everything, good and bad, that happened after the first missiles were fired.

Today, as the country enters its third week of war against Iran, President Donald J. Trump was on the golf course, illustrating the observation of journalist E.J. Dionne in the New York Times that “from the very beginning of this war, we got a sense that there wasn’t a great deal of serious thought put into it by the president of the United States about how it might end, what our objectives were, what needed to be done to protect Americans who are in the Middle East, what might happen to oil in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Although the administration appears to be trying to convince Americans that the U.S. military’s destruction of the Iranian military means the U.S. has won the war, Iranian leadership needed simply to continue in power to declare victory. Then, blocking the 20% of the world’s oil that flows through the Strait of Hormuz would give them leverage over the war’s outcome.

On March 10, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that senior defense officials told them the Iranian military is adjusting its tactics to strike at the communications and defense systems protecting U.S. troops. Those tactics include drone strikes. The same day, Marc Caputo, Barak Ravid, and Colin Demarest of Axios reported that Ukrainian officials had tried several months ago to sell the U.S. anti-drone technology for downing Iran-made drones as a sign of thanks for U.S. support and as a way to strengthen ties between the U.S. and Ukraine, but the U.S. did not pursue the offer.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly responded: “This characterization made by these cowardly unnamed sources is not accurate and proves that they are simply outside looking in. [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth and the armed forces did an incredible job planning for all possible responses by the Iranian regime, and the undisputed success of Operation Epic Fury speaks for itself.”

And yet the fallout from the strikes on Iran by the U.S. and Israel appears to have caught the administration by surprise. Trump told Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News yesterday that he was “surprised” that Iran attacked other countries after the U.S. and Israeli strikes. He also said strikes on Saturday on Kharg Island, which is about fifteen miles off the Iranian coast and is home to Iran’s primary oil export terminal, “totally demolished” most of the island but that “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”

President Donald J. Trump posted on social media Saturday morning: “Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe. We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.”

Despite what Trump claimed was the utter destruction of Iran’s military, he asked other countries to contribute to the effort to reopen the strait. “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated. In the meantime the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water. One way or the other, we will soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE!”

Since he took office more than a year ago, Trump has gone out of his way to antagonize our allies and partners, warning them that the United States will act alone and working to undermine the international alliances the U.S. has shaped since World War II. Now, having sparked a regional war in the Middle East after ignoring what virtually everyone said would be the result of attacking Iran a second time, Trump is begging other countries to come to his aid.

In yesterday’s NBC News interview, Trump told Welker and Marquez that several countries have committed to helping reopen the strait, but he declined to name them. “They’ve not only committed, but they think it’s a great idea,” he said. He also said that “Iran wants to make a deal,” but he has declined “because the terms aren’t good enough yet.” Today Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Tehran had not even asked for negotiations, let alone a ceasefire.

That the White House is in turmoil showed this morning first of all in the fact that one of the people making the administration’s case on the talk shows was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, the man who added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal messaging app on which members of the administration were making plans to strike Houthi militants in Yemen, a chat that would hide administration discussions from the record-keeping required by public records laws.

On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, over a chyron that read, “OIL PRICES SKYROCKET AS IRAN THROTTLES TRAFFIC IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ,” Jake Tapper noted that while the U.S. has said it would soon send naval escorts through the strait, shipping executives have told CNN “that all their requests for escorts have…been rebuffed. Tapper asked Waltz if Trump is simply hoping other countries will send naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz or if they had committed to it.

Waltz answered that “we have the energy dominance in place,” then noted that in the past, other countries had worked alongside the U.S. to keep energy flowing through the strait, and Trump is calling on the world to do the same thing again. Waltz said: “We certainly welcome, encourage, and even demand their participation to help their own economies.”

On Face the Nation, another odd salesperson for Trump’s war, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, told host Margaret Brennan that “you have to understand that America is not going to have its economy harmed by what the Iranians are doing.” Hassett implied that because the U.S. produces more oil now than it did in the 1970s, it doesn’t really need oil from the Persian Gulf. The Iranians “think that they’re gonna harm the U.S. economy and get President Trump to back down,” he said. “There couldn’t be anything that was a stupider thing to say. ‘Cause the bottom line is that our economy has got all this momentum in the world, and we’ve got lots and lots of oil.”

The U.S. does indeed produce more oil and natural gas than it consumes, but it cannot use much of what it produces. The key is prices and refineries. The U.S. tends to produce light, sweet crude oil, a term for oil that flows easily and has low sulfur content. Because it is easy to refine and more valuable than heavy, sour crude, U.S. producers have an incentive to sell it on the open market. Even if they wanted to keep it at home, U.S. refineries are set up to refine the cheaper heavy crude oil, so the U.S. does not have the refining capacity to process the oil it currently produces and must buy what it needs from elsewhere. This means the U.S. is inextricably tied to the international oil markets.

The administration appears to be taking the position that the problem is not Trump’s launching an ill-thought-out war, but rather the media outlets’ reporting on that war. Although Trump has been conversing freely with reporters by cell phone since the war broke out, yesterday morning he posted on social media: “The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife “Papers” and Media actually want us to lose the War. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America. Fortunately, as proven by our Great and Conclusive Election Win in 2024, the People of our Country understand what is happening far better than the Fake News Media!”

Less than two hours later, Trump posted an image titled “PRESIDENT TRUMP IS RESHAPING THE MEDIA,” with three categories: “GONE,” “REFORMS,” and “WINNING.” Under “gone” was the defunding of PBS and NPR, as well as a list of reporters who have been fired since Trump took office in 2025. Under “reforms,” the image claimed Trump was the “Most Accessible POTUS Ever,” boasted that under CBS’s new ownership by Trump ally David Ellison the station has a “News Bias Ombudsman,” and suggested that CNN would soon be under “New Ownership” as well. Under “winning” was a quotation from The Guardian that “Trump is waging war against the media—and winning.”

Hours later, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatened the broadcast licenses of media stations. He quoted Trump when he posted: “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not…. It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.” Then Carr slipped in his own fake news, suggesting that Trump won “a landslide election victory” when in fact he received less than 50% of the vote, and concluded: “Time for change!”

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood that a free press is imperative for a democracy. They established the right to a free press in the First Amendment that begins the Bill of Rights. Silencing critics is the refuge of those who know what they are doing is unpopular and unjustifiable.

Jim Acosta, who left CNN, noted that while the administration is attempting to establish a state media, the American people increasingly have the option of reading independent journalism. “Yes,” Acosta wrote, “Trump put me on his media hit list. I regret to report to the notoriously thin-skinned, twice elected, yet soon to be thrice-impeached president that I am still here, loving the freedom of independent media…. Living rent free in the mind of the president of the United States is indeed liberating, especially when you are coloring outside the lines of corporate media.”

Yesterday evening, the official White House social media account on X tried to reassure Americans that Trump knows what he’s doing. It posted an image of the American flag over a stealth bomber with the words “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH” and “NO PANICANS!”

And yet, in what seemed to be panicked comments tonight, Trump on social media appeared to take on the rifts showing up among MAGA leaders over the Iran war, saying of isolationist America First MAGAs: “THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon to blow up the United States of America, the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the World.”

Another post blamed Iranian AI and disinformation for stories that he said are “FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information.” He reiterated support for Carr’s attack on the media and insisted he won the presidential election “IN A LANDSLIDE.”

In yet another post, the president’s account attacked the U.S. Supreme Court for declaring his tariffs unconstitutional, then blamed the justices for ruining the nation by permitting Democrat Joe Biden to be inaugurated rather than “call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020.”

In an interview with Financial Times published this evening, Trump warned that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have a “very bad” future if allies don’t help open the Strait of Hormuz. And tonight, on Air Force One, Trump told reporters: “Really, I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory. It’s the place from which they get their energy, and they should come and they should help us protect it. You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all, because we don’t need it. We have a lot of oil.”

Looks like someone really wants a bailout:

Donald Trump has warned that Nato faces a “very bad” future if US allies fail to assist in opening up the Strait of Hormuz, sending a blunt message to European nations to join his war effort in Iran.

The US president told the FT in an interview on Sunday that he could also delay his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping later this month as he presses Beijing to help unblock the crucial waterway.

“It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the Strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump said, arguing that Europe and China are heavily dependent on oil from the Gulf, unlike the US. “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of Nato,” he added.

Trump’s comments, made in an eight-minute phone call with the FT, came a day after he appealed to China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK to join a “team effort” to open up the chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes. Iran in effect shut the strait after the US and Israel launched their war more than two weeks ago, sparking fears of a new oil price shock for the global economy. US efforts to open the waterway have largely failed. International oil prices hit $106 a barrel on Sunday evening, up about 45 per cent since the start of the war.

The whole world has seen how Trump is treating our NATO allies who have stood by us for over 80 years.  The whole world sees how Trump is treating South American nations who have done nothing to the US.  It’s no wonder everyone is turning down his demands that they dispatch their navies to bail him out.

Trump has cultivated allies almost as carefully as he planned this military campaign. It’s the art of . . . the art of . . . well, the art of something or other.