It’s become pretty clear that Trump believed the Iranian regime would yield, quickly. He has persistently talked about the Venezuelan model – decapitation, cooperative regime, steal the oil, immense self-enrichment, affirmation of him as God Emperor. Easy peasy. Chop-chop.

It’s clear very little planning or thought went into what would happen if the Iranian regime fought back, the war dragged on, and global oil, gas, fertilizer, and chemical products that come from the region just stopped coming.

The arrogance of the God Emperor, and his Crusader Defense Secretary, to believe that if they bellowed, and bombed, all would be good comes despite our long failed history in the region, universal warnings from scholars and experts, and Trump’s own intelligence agency warning that a heavy bombing campaign would not be sufficient for the Iranian regime to fall.

Here’s new reporting from the Washington Post, Intel report warns large-scale war ‘unlikely’ to oust Iran’s regime (gift link):

A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment, a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials say has “only just begun.”

The findings, confirmed to The Washington Post by three people familiar with the report’s contents, raise doubts about President Donald Trump’s declared plan to “clean out” Iran’s leadership structure and install a ruler of his choosing.

The report, completed about a week before the United States and Israel initiated the war on Feb. 28, outlined succession scenarios stemming from either a narrowly tailored campaign against Iran’s leaders or a broader assault against its leadership and government institutions, the people familiar with its findings said. In both cases, the intelligence concluded that Iran’s clerical and military establishment would respond to the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by following protocols designed to preserve continuity of power, these people said.

The prospect of Iran’s fragmented opposition taking control of the country was described as “unlikely,” said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified report.

So here we are. And we now entering a very dangerous place.

First, the price shocks to the US and global economy are going to be significant. Here’s gas prices today – up 50 cents in just the last few days.

Petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan wrote this on Twitter today:

National average price of gasoline creeping higher at $3.469/gal this morning, up 52.8c/gal from a week ago while diesel has hit $4.583/gal, up 84.3c/gal from a week ago. Americans today will spend nearly $200 million more on gasoline than just 7 days ago.

Perspective: The national average gas price from Jan 2021–Jan 2025 was $3.461/gal on average. Today it’s $3.469/gal. Not apples-to-apples (four years vs. one day), but helpful context beyond the peak seen in 2022.

Prices for food and goods transported domestically or internationally are going to rise now, everywhere in the world, due to this new Gulf War. Airline travel is going to get much more expensive too.

 

All of these prices shocks will come to an American economy where growth had already significantly slowed, where jobs were already being lost, where inflation was already rising again, and where our fiscal condition has already deteriorated due to Trump’s reckless tax cuts and the eventual ending of his illegal tariffs. These new prices shocks are going to make all these trends worse, dramatically weakening our country and wrecking havoc on the economic lives of the American people.

So, of course, given all this, there is tremendous pressure on Trump to end the war. Ending the war can come in two forms. Declaring victory, and heading home. Or dramatic escalation, further pain, to get the regime to yield. Trump has chosen the latter – dramatic escalation. In the last 24 hours the US-Israeli campaign has begun attacking the energy infrastructure in Iran – as Putin has done in Ukraine – endangering the health of tens of millions of Iranians.

Here’s a report from a CNN correspondent from Tehran a few hours ago:

Here is a new report from CNN, just released a few minutes ago:

Iran of course has responded to this escalation by launching attacks against US and Gulf state targets throughout the region. Here’s the Iranian Foreign Minister:

For reference here is a map of the region so you get a sense of how vulnerable the Gulf states are, and our bases too:

As we discussed on Friday, I think it is imperative that Democrats attempt to speak with one loud voice now about this increasingly dangerous moment. Here’s the near term agenda I think Democrats should adopt for all future negotiations with the Trump regime and their Republican allies:

Make Clear We Support Ukraine and Europe, Not Russia – Russia is helping Iran attack America, Ukraine is coming to defend us. There can be no more corrupt and dangerous Trumpian appeasement of Putin, particularly as the tide may be turning against Russia in Ukraine.

Democrats should revive the bi-partisan Russian sanctions bill in the Senate, and introduce an aid package for Ukraine to re-direct our focus to the war that is far more geopolitically important to America than our new Gulf War.

Work To End This New Gulf War, And Trump’s Global Imperial Ambitions – Put America back on the side of rule of law and democracy, here and everywhere, and end this illegal, and unnecessary, war that is now threatening the global and US economies.

Roll Back The New, Illegal Tariffs – To help ease rising inflation Trump must be forced to roll back his new, illegal and destructive tariffs. The Dem AGs have already filed a new law suit. We should be forcing votes once again in Congress and fight this reckless policy.

Rescind The Trump Tax Cuts, Take Back The Extra ICE Funding – With the $2.4t in tariff revenue Trump was planning on getting from his tariffs (over 10 years) eventually disappearing, and our fiscal condition in the US worsening, we cannot afford the Trump tax cuts and extra ICE funding. Both policies, at the core of the big ugly bill, should be reversed.

Make The US A Clean Energy Superpower, Fight For True Energy Independence, And Lower Energy Prices For The American People – This war is a reminder that committing America to the transition from fossil fuels to cheaper, safer, cleaner renewable energy is not just an economic and climate necessity it is a geopolitical one too. Paul Krugman has a terrific piece on this today well worth your time.

 

At 8:50 yesterday morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’ Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

As Alex Leary and Vera Bergengruen of the Wall Street Journal observed, the demand for unconditional surrender was quite a shift from Trump’s original promise to the people of Iran that the future is “yours to take,” or even his early claim that he was hoping to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump’s shift highlighted that there appears to have been very little planning for what would happen after U.S. and Israeli bombs began to rain on Iran.

Leary and Bergengruen noted that Trump was bouncing ideas for the next stage of the assault off journalists even as ships stopped passing through the Strait of Hormuz, American citizens were stranded in the Middle East, the war spread to countries throughout the region, and U.S. military personnel died.

When reporters asked about what Trump meant by unconditional surrender, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to say that unconditional surrender meant whatever Trump decides it does whenever he decides what the goals of Operation Epic Fury are. She said: “What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has [sic] been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender whether they say it themselves or not.”

Like other administration figures, Leavitt suggested that the violence itself was the point, saying: “Frankly, they don’t have a lot of people to say that for them because the United States and the state of Israel have completely wiped out more than fifty leaders of the former terrorist regime including the supreme leader himself.”

President of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran’s enemies “must take their dream of the Iranian people’s unconditional surrender to their graves,” but he did apologize to neighboring countries for the strikes against U.S. military bases in their lands. He said Iran would suspend those strikes unless those states themselves launched attacks on Iran.

At 6:11 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “Iran, which is being beat to Hell, has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore. This promise was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack. They were looking to take over and rule the Middle East. It is the first time that Iran has ever lost, in thousands of years, to surrounding Middle Eastern Countries. They have said, ‘Thank you President Trump.’ I have said, ‘You’re welcome!’ Iran is no longer the ‘Bully of the Middle East,’ they are, instead, ‘THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,’ and will be for many decades until they surrender or, more likely, completely collapse! Today Iran will be hit very hard! Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Zach Everson of Public Citizen recalled a quotation from William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, summing up Adolf Hitler’s view: “We must always demand so much that we can never be satisfied.”

Today, on Air Force One, when asked “what unconditional surrender looks like to you,” Trump answered: “Where they cry uncle or when they can’t fight any longer and there’s nobody around to cry uncle. That could happen too…. If they surrender or if there is nobody around to surrender but they’re rendered useless in terms of military.”

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned representatives from sixteen Latin American and Caribbean countries that if they don’t adopt more aggressive strategies against drug cartels, the Trump administration will do it for them. Hegseth urged the countries to remain “Christian nations, under God, proud of our shared heritage with strong borders,” and not be led astray by “radical narco-communism, anarcho-tyranny…and uncontrolled mass migration.”

Tiago Rogero of The Guardian reported that Latin American countries resisted the framing of Hegseth’s speech. The title of his article used the word “dismay.”

In Miami today, Trump and his advisors convened a “Shield of the Americas” summit with twelve of Latin America’s Trump-aligned leaders. At the meeting, Trump called for an “anti-cartel coalition” that would use military might to crush drug cartels. Former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem told the group: “Now that America is secure, and our borders are secure, we want to focus on our neighbors and help our neighbors with their borders and the challenges they have.”

Trump suggested that Cuba was next on his list of countries to topple. “We’re looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba,” Trump said. “They have no money, they have no oil, they have a bad philosophy and bad regime.” “Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was, but it will have a great new life,” he said.

In Need to Know, David Rothkopf today called out the madness of the fact world trade and global security is being shattered by a single man. “Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.”

Why has Trump launched a war against Iran on a whim, attacked other countries, and upended world trade, Rothkopf asked. “Because he’s insane. Because he’s venal. Because he’s a malignant narcissist. Because he’s a sociopath. Because he has a fragile ego. Because those around him exacerbate and play to those traits to advance their own interests. Because CEOs and investors do likewise to fill their coffers. Because to some people, whether he is insane or malevolent or repugnant or not matters less than whether his actions will feather their nests, increase their power.

“Because they, the billionaires…play their games and the consequences for the little people down below, the consequences for us, hardly matter a whit.”

On Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called attention to another factor in play. In a speech to the Senate, Whitehouse noted that throughout his second term, Trump has advanced policies that help Russia, pausing weapons shipments to Ukraine, easing sanctions on Russia, and pushing a peace deal favorable to Russia. Last summer, he welcomed Putin to American soil, and administration officials have parroted Russian propaganda. Russian state media gloated when Trump “installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi upon taking office stopped the anti-kleptocracy work that had targeted Russian oligarchs.

Trump’s new national security policy threw traditional U.S. allies overboard and favored policies that Russian government officials praised as “largely consistent” with their own.

“If Trump were purposefully doing Russia’s bidding,” Whitehouse said, “it is hard to see what he would be doing differently. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn’t make sense that the President of the United States, who insists—insists—on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person and that one person is Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.”

Whitehouse suggested that the answer “could…have something to do with Trump’s close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.” He noted that the Epstein files, riddled as they are with references to Trump, are also riddled with references to Russian girls and women, Russian operatives, and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Whitehouse spoke about how many of Epstein’s victims believed he was recording them, and how there were hidden cameras installed throughout his homes. He quoted Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, who wrote: “He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors.”

Whitehouse suggested the possibility that Epstein might have been working with Russian operatives, but emphasized that we don’t know. “Epstein was an inveterate liar and a criminal who often sought to exaggerate his power and influence, and the Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens,” he said. “What we do know is that a significant number of powerful men—our current President, some of his cabinet secretaries, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others—were very mixed up with Epstein at different times. And Epstein seems to have been very mixed up with Russia.”

“We also know that there is a cover-up afoot at the Department of Justice,” he continued, where officials are “trying to shield Trump from something in the Epstein files.”

“One of the great forces that Washington runs on is normalcy bias,” he said, but he suggested looking past that bias to note that “we have links with Russia, girls from Russia, money from Russia, people from Russia, deals and transactions with Russia, contacts with people with Russian intelligence, news reports exploring contacts with Russia, and an official investigation from the government of Poland into an Epstein-Russia connection.”

Yesterday Noah Robertson, Ellen Nakashima, and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Russia is providing Iran with the information it needs to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East, including aircraft and ships.

During a roundtable on college sports, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about that report, saying: “It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran target and attack Americans now.” Trump responded: “I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time. We’re talking about something else.

This is a genuine Dept of Defense press release announced on March7.  (NOT Dept of War — there is no such thing.)

 

A “believed to be casualty?”  WTF????  

Got that – the “believed to be death” and well, we think the dead guy could be this CWO3.

Has the family been advised? What is the Survivor Assistance Officer supposed to tell the family?  Maybe the SAO could say something like:  “Well, we got this dead guy and we think he may be your husband but we’ll let you know after we figure it out.”

 

Trump went to Dover AFB today to greet the remains of six Americans killed in his useless, unnecessary war in Iran.  At such an occasion, civilians remove their headgear, military keep their headgear on.

If I had worn a baseball cap to a funeral, my grandfather would have snatched my head bald and told me to go wait in the car.  When I was growing up in Mississippi we referred to people like Trump as “white trash.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the “Epstein Files” are being released a bit at a time, it has become clear that the Dept of Justice is withholding documents damaging to Trump. Someone in DOJ slipped up and released a document containing charges by a women who, as a young girl, was sexually assaulted by Trump. That document said the girl was interviewed “four times” – – – but only one interview was released. Members of Congress demanded the other three interviews be released. They were released yesterday. Bombshell.

TRUMP: “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.”

According to an interview with a woman conducted by the FBI as part of an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, those were some of the first words Donald Trump directed at her before he began a sexual assault that ended with Trump reportedly hitting her and pulling her hair.

Overshadowed by Thursday’s firing of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the Department of Justice quietly released previously missing FBI interviews with an Epstein victim whose explosive allegations have sent shockwaves through Washington.

In files dated between August and October 2019, the woman—whose name is redacted—claims that when she was between 13 and 15 years old, Epstein took her to either New York or New Jersey. In “a very tall building with huge rooms,” he introduced her to Trump. Trump, she said, “didn’t like that I was a boy-girl,” which interview notes interpreted to mean tomboy.

According to the woman’s account, other people were present initially, but she could not recall who they were. Trump asked them to leave the room, then said “something to the effect of, ‘Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be,'” according to the interview notes. Trump then unzipped his pants and placed her head “down to his penis,” she recalled. She said she “bit the s— out of it.” He then pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head, she stated.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-epstein-2675637880/

I mean — she did it all — did everything she could to make herself irresistible to Trump.  Go back, find some old photos of her 6-7-8 years ago and compare them to today.

• A little nip here, little tuck there, little tightening and lifting here and there.
• Botox on the lips.
• Change hair style.
• $56,000 for a new Rolex.
• Pushed her husband aside for Corey Lewandowski.

Then, after winning Trump’s stamp of approval and after being named Secretary of Homeland Security, she proceeded to:

• Institute a reign of terror that rained terror down on innocent people and innocent cities.
• Flit around the country, travel to the world’s most notorious, wicked, vile prison and pose for pics everywhere.
• Denounce innocent people murdered by her ICE as being “domestic terrorists.”
• Cut training time for ICE agents to ensure all they learned was violence, slamming people to the ground, lying.
• Hire huge numbers of thugs, losers, and trash, giving them a gun and telling them to clean out America.
• Unleash her own domestic terrorists on American cities.

Yes, poor little Kristi Noem.  She did everything exactly the way Trump wanted in a doomed effort to please him. 

And to thank her, he fired her.

Now think about it:  She has no future.  He puts her in charge of a non-existent organization where she will make an ever greater fool of herself.  Meanwhile, no doubt Trump has ordered his people to keep her completely away from him.

She never learned this truth: 

EVERYTHING, EVERYONE THAT TRUMP TOUCHES DIES. 

 

In Memoriam: Gone but not forgotten pic.twitter.com/wwT66dCDPw

— Jared Moskowitz (@JaredEMoskowitz) March 5, 2026

 

Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bed.

That isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as The New York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.

And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Jared Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War.

We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment’s war fever to ask: “Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?”

Here’s what we know. The third round of nuclear talks between the United States and Iran wrapped up in Geneva on February 26th and 27th. The Omani foreign minister, who’d been mediating the talks for months, told CBS News on the eve of the bombing that a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had fully given in to American demands and agreed it would never produce nuclear material for a bomb, or an ICBM capable of striking the United States.

A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took.

And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.

On the morning of February 28th, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was gathered together in their offices for meetings. That body, the one that manages Iran’s nuclear dossier and makes the regime’s most consequential decisions, is exactly where you would expect the Iranian leadership to be sitting after a round of talks with America that their own foreign minister was calling “historic.”

They were almost certainly deliberating whether to accept or reject Jared’s American proposal. And according to the Wall Street Journal, American and Israeli intelligence had verified that senior Iranian leaders would be gathered at three locations that could be struck simultaneously. How they knew that is, as the Journal carefully noted, still unknown.

In other words, Iran’s entire decision-making apparatus was assembled in one place most likely because they were in the middle of an active negotiation with Jared Kushner. The talks had created a predictable, intelligenceable window.

Diplomats who were part of the earlier rounds of talks now tell reporters that the Iranian side has come to believe they’d been misled, and that Tehran now views the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations as, in their words, “a ruse designed to keep Iran from expecting and preparing for the surprise strikes.”

That’s not the assessment of Iranian state media spinning a narrative after a military defeat; it’s the conclusion of people who were in the room, speaking to American journalists, on the record.

Now layer on top of that what we know about who Witkoff was meeting with in the days before they sat down with the Iranians. He flew to Israel and was briefed directly by Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials and then, with Kushner, flew to Oman and Geneva and sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators.

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

We also know that the Trump regime’s explanations for why the attacks happened when they did have collapsed into open contradiction. Secretary of State Rubio initially told reporters the US struck because Israel was going to attack anyway and Iran would have retaliated against American forces. Trump then went on television and flipped the scenario upside-down, saying he might’ve “forced Israel’s hand.”

The two most senior officials in the administration told two diametrically opposite stories within 48 hours of each other, and neither story explains why the diplomacy that the Omani mediator called substantively successful — that essentially got America everything we said we wanted — was abandoned without the final round.

None of this proves that Kushner was running a deliberate double-cross operation designed to concentrate Iranian leadership in a killable location. What it does prove, though, is that the question is entirely legitimate and demands an answer under oath.

This is not the first time in American history that such a question has had to be asked, or that it damaged America’s reputation on the world stage. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger stood before the cameras and told the world that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. The Paris negotiations, he assured everyone, were on the verge of ending the war.

But it was a lie: two months later, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the most intensive bombing campaign of the entire war, dropping more tonnage on North Vietnam in twelve days than had been dropped in all of 1969 and 1970 combined.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 on terms that serious historians have long argued were not meaningfully different from what had been on the table long before the bombing. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to accept his share of the prize, saying that peace had not actually been achieved and the Vietnamese had been deceived because the negotiations were a sham. And he was right: the war dragged on for two more years and was ended by Jerry Ford with the fall of Saigon.

The question that has haunted the world since those 1973 negotiations is the same question hanging over Kushner’s Geneva talks today: were the talks ever meant to succeed on their own terms, or were they simply a setup to destroy the Iranian leadership even if they gave us everything we wanted?

There’s also the Reagan precedent. His campaign was credibly accused of running a back-channel to Iran to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran so that Jimmy Carter couldn’t get a pre-election boost from securing their freedom. It took decades for anything close to a full picture to emerge, but now we know that the Reagan campaign successfully committed that treason just to get him into the White House in 1980.

We don’t have decades this time. A war is underway and Americans are already dying. The leadership of a modern, developed country of ninety million people has been decapitated. And every foreign ministry on Earth is watching and drawing conclusions about whether they’ll ever again trust American diplomacy.

If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again.

The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.

North Korea is watching. Iran’s neighbors are watching. China is watching. The next time an American president sends an envoy somewhere with a genuine offer of peace, why would anyone believe it? Le Duc Tho knew the answer to that question when Kissinger betrayed his Vietnamese negotiating partners in 1973. The world is apparently relearning it now.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

The man at the center of this diplomacy grew up treating Benjamin Netanyahu like a member of the family. That’s not a reason to assume guilt, but it sure as hell is a reason to demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.