Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this week that the Republicans are a bunch of crybabies who hate it when the Democrats fight back. When asked about the GOP’s reaction to a successful gerrymandering effort in Virginia, which threaten to give the Democrats an edge in the coming midterm elections, the New York congresswoman responded:

“Wah wah wah.”

She continued:

“Democrats have … asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering, and for 10 years, Republicans have said no. … These are the rules that they have set. … They have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight and takes everything sitting down. What they’re mad at is that we are here in a new day.

“We have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they have, the Republican Party doesn’t like [it]. If Republicans decide they would like to revisit a ban on partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here. We can end this all today. But they don’t want to, because they like continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. We have an obligation to defend ourselves.”

The decade has been educational. By the time of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I think most members of the Democratic Party learned that there are no punishments for treachery. A criminal can mount an insurrection and still be president. Democrats learned that the inherent goodness of the American people is greatly exaggerated.

But what about the other side of that? As there are no punishments for vice, there are also no rewards for virtue. I’m not sure Democrats have learned that. Many are still holding on to the terms of the old deal. Some, like Ocasio-Cortez, seem to get it, though. They understand that they, and only they, can prevent the country from completely tipping into tyranny. The Democrats can’t stand above politics and expect the American people’s blessing. They must fight Donald Trump’s crimes against democracy. They must be his consequences.

Only then can there be a new deal.

For more, I bring you this second part of my interview with someone who goes by “The Angry Black Woman.” In the first part of our conversation, we focused on hope and the challenge of holding on to it. In today’s post, we focus on the Democrats and whether they have the guts to pursue retribution in the name of freedom and democracy.

“I want the US to do what Germany did after World War II. If you were part of the Nazi party, SS, or an enabler, you were banned from running for, or holding, public office. There should not be a single Republican that has supported what has been happening for the past 10 years that should be allowed to prosper in any way. No television panels, no talk shows, no podcasts, no books. They should be shunned from society, because they are complicit in everything that has happened. Part of the ‘new New Deal’ should include these things.”

What have the Democrats learned since last year and have they learned the right lesson? Chuck Schumer seems to have learned how to fight. Others have endorsed a Senate candidate with a Nazi tattoo?

Not a damn thing.

They haven’t learned that “traditional” politics no longer exists. You have to meet the moment. The current leadership is not up to the task.

Schumer learned how to fight on the issue of ICE funding? That was an easy battle to win. People have seen what ICE has been doing so the public sentiment was there for the Democrats to hold the line.

But I don’t think it was just them holding the line. Brian Baez (@MentallyDivine on TikTok) laid out that the Republicans voted with the Democrats because they were being personally affected (eg, Delta taking away their special status). It was impacting them and they didn’t want the public to know. I don’t know if that is what made them vote the funding bill through, but it is on-brand for the Republicans.

That said, I agree with what you wrote:

“But if there’s newfound strength in the Democrats, it’s because there’s newfound weakness in the Republicans, especially the president.”

The fact that the GOP is so incompetent at governing, coupled with having a maniacal man-child as their dear leader, made it easier for the Democrats to hold the line. Either way, it was a low bar and we shouldn’t be giving cookies for doing the bare minimum.

So only time will tell if they are truly up for the task.

We have to look at the totality of how the Democrats move. Praising them for holding the line while people are being murdered is one thing. Supporting a man [Graham Platner] who bears a Nazi symbol on his chest is a whole other issue. It’s emblematic of the party as a whole.

When I read your article on Platner, I started screaming! I had to read it a few times – still screaming! – before I could think about the implications. I posed a hypothetical to my husband: “I am thinking about getting a tattoo on my chest and I chose a design. It’s a Totenkopf. He looked at me like I was crazy and said: “Waffen SS is illegal here.”

For those that don’t know, my husband is German. I live in the country that Americans like to sensationalize the violence that happened here. These symbols and the distortion of history anger me to my core.

For Platner to dismiss this tattoo by claiming “half my family is Jewish” is akin to saying I have a Black friend so I can’t possibly be racist.

It’s also incredibly insulting and frustrating that anyone in the Democratic Party, progressive or not, would support this person.

And if Platner is not racist, then he is incredibly stupid for putting such a specific – and permanent – design on his body without knowing what it means, especially to half of his family.

But, as we have seen, stupidity is not a deal breaker.

This is not the first time a “progressive” has run into problems. Look at [Pennsylvania Senator] John Fetterman. He had a history of hunting down a Black man with a gun, but Democratic voters stood behind him because he was a progressive who should be part of the big tent.

See how that turned out.

Graham Platner refusing to apologize, and people wanting to forgive him, shows how white people ruin things. The Democratic Party, even if a small number, opening its arms to accept him shows how broken the party is. When people show you who they are, believe them.

There is a large effort online to reshape the Democratic Party so that it’s more welcoming (not my word) to “the working class.” This effort mostly comes from what I call the pod bros. I think they are trying to discredit the influence of Black people in order to take over the party. I’m making this sound simpler than it is. What’s your view?

Listen, the pod bros are the epitome of fragility. A number of these chads and kens have a platform because of a Black man providing for them the opportunity. They are feckless and the type of progressivism that MLK warned us about. They want to be the center of the universe and will burn the world down to get it. I don’t see them as different from the maga crowd – except for wanting universal healthcare.

The white working class will never be a part of the Democratic Party. These pod bros and corporate interests will never let that happen. That is why they consistently refuse to address the demands of Black voters. That is why they do everything they can to divide us.

Interestingly enough, they want to discredit Black voters but will be the first to blame us when they lose. They are saying that we should be glad they let us in the room, but how dare we want a seat at the table.

Last April, I told you that if we needed to depend on white people to save us, we were f-----. I was right (I am going to keep saying that). Not only with the presidential election but look at what just happened in Texas with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. Numbers don’t lie.

Texan voters showed up for a primary between a Black woman and a white man. They chose the white man. Now he is working to reach that white working-class voters but will he? He touts the bible, is a nice white man with little experience whose arrogance wouldn’t let him do what was right for Texas. That is who the mostly white, Latino, and Asian voters chose to run against horrible Republican choices. [James Talarico] doesn’t have the temperament to go against Paxton or Cornyn but maybe those elusive voters will show up. I don’t know.

During the suffrage movement, Black women led the charge in helping all women gain the right to vote. When white women gained that right, Black women were still denied access. White women told them it wasn’t their time and to sit down. We had to keep fighting on our own.

When 21-year-old activist Fred Hampton was working to unite the groups, he had poor Black, white, Latin and Asian people who were paying attention. He was uniting these groups to show that our problems weren’t with each other, but with those who had the money and power. The response was for the FBI murdering him in 1969.

From resistance to the New Deal to withholding GI benefits to Black veterans, from denying healthcare to Black people (Dying of Whiteness is a book everyone should read) to the erasure of Black history and the minimization of chattel slavery as the foundation of the United States – whenever elusive white working-class voters have had a chance to stand up and say enough, they have always chosen their whiteness.

The pod bros are just repeating the same history.

They will use Black people, use their knowledge, abilities, know-how, and community-building skills to propel themselves, but when we look for them to stand behind us, they are nowhere to be found.

They tell us we don’t matter or that we are playing “identity politics” or that what’s good for them is good for everyone. DEI and affirmative action were controversial only because we were able to be a part of the system and excel. That is why they sought to destroy them. White women were the major benefactors of both of those initiatives, however, so their absence is going to be eye-opening for them.

White women actively participated in their own demise just as they have always done. When the wind shifts, as it will, they will come to us again for that solidarity shtick – and we will have another choice to make. That is how they use us and then expect us to be grateful.

So they can downplay our contributions all they want. But if we, collectively, decided to sit it out, those elusive voters won’t show up. And then the Democrats will come back to us with hat in hand.

In the end, all of this is pointless if fascism completes its takeover. We had a good run, but I believe the time of American exceptionalism is gone. The only question now is going to be how to remake the US.

It won’t be in the image of the pod bros, I can tell you that.

I think the Democrats can restore public faith in themselves and in American democracy if they pursue accountability to the greatest extent possible. We need a new New Deal, but we also need to see some serious consequences. What are your thoughts?

I feel like you always set me up for a major rant!

Seriously, though, I believe that Democrats can restore faith. The question is how long will it take and what will we have to go through? I don’t know if they are built for “accountability to the greatest extent.”

We shouldn’t even be having this conversation. January 6th should have been the absolute deal breaker. I have so much anger. Everybody involved, and I mean everybody, should be under the jail right now.

But the party failed us in doing that. Joe Biden, for all the good he did, was too much of an institutionalist when we needed him to be something else. Hell, he could have done both but his focus was on that elusive white working-class voter. Look how that turned out.

The Democrats keep wanting to “play by the rules” when the rule book has been burned. We no longer have the “norms” that we had before. The world order is a whole new animal and we are far behind. The Democrats have not shown they are willing to fight the way Republicans do. They keep showing up with flowers to a gunfight.

For me, accountability looks like this:

I would not start with impeaching Trump. Save the best for last. Get rid of all of his enablers first. Once they are gone, he has no one left to shield him. This means getting rid of Thomas and Alito for taking money from the billionaires to rule in their favor. Then get Judge Aileen Cannon out. Not just impeached but she should lose her license to practice law. The full Jack Smith report should be released.

I know they are fighting this now, but Cannon was put in place to do what she did and it led us to be where we are now. All of the Epstein files need to be released and everybody implicated needs to be held accountable. Republican, Democrat. Just put them under the jail.

Musk and Thiel need to be investigated, fined, jailed, and/or deported. Or both. Then go after that whole crime family. Start with Jared and work your way through. Seize their money, assets, every damn thing they have stolen. Then impeach (for a third time) and convict Trump. Put him in jail – for war crimes, treason, just being a horrible, vindictive man-child who has created so much destruction.

However, I know that I will never see any of that from the Democrats. There may be hearings and information will come out, but it will just fade away like all the rest, and real accountability will never happen.

Some folks may go to jail and we will never see justice. Democrats have too many purity tests and rules that stop them from being great.

I am pragmatic. I don’t need perfection, I need results.

Kamala Harris recently gave an interview where she said make your vote transactional and I agree. “Vote blue no matter who” doesn’t fly anymore, because we see that it does not work.

So I want to see a party that will put safeguards in place so that we never have to face this crisis again. I want to see term limits for the Congress and the courts. I want to see the John Lewis Voting Rights bill enacted and, in a perfect world, getting rid of the Electoral College. Make the rich pay taxes and put laws in place that put humanity above capitalism. Create pathways for universal child care, laws that constrain healthcare costs, and get religion out of our schools.

Most importantly, I want to see my rights, as a Black woman, to stop being up for debate. DEI, CRT, whatever you want to call it – I am a human being and I should have the same rights, freedoms, access, privileges and opportunities that a white person has. Periodt.

We should have dealt with America’s original sin after the Civil War. The fact that we didn’t is why we are at this point. In all honesty, if you are running for office and you cannot focus on this issue as being critical, you get nothing from me. Not my time, money, or my vote.

Lastly, I want the US to do what Germany did after World War II. If you were part of the Nazi party, SS, or an enabler, you were banned from running for, or holding, public office. There should not be a single Republican that has supported what has been happening for the past 10 years that should be allowed to prosper in any way. No television panels, no talk shows, no podcasts, no books. They should be shunned from society, because they are complicit in everything that has happened. Part of the “new New Deal” should include these things.

The bottom line is that we have an opportunity to create the country that we have always claimed to be. One that is fair, just and equal. One that has laws that apply to everyone, regardless of income or color of skin. The question is whether the Democratic Party has the courage.

I don’t know, but I guess we are going to find out.

The president has lost control of the Epstein narrative so much that congressional Democrats have turned it against him. For it to be successful, however, they must understand where one aspect of the narrative ends and where another aspect begins. If they do not focus on the facts of Epstein’s life, and instead play footsie with conspiracy theories about it, their gambit could backfire. They could find themselves where Donald Trump is.

Writing in Dissent last month, Lindsay Beyerstein wrote that there’s very little to suggest that Jeffrey Epstein was anything more than a rich deviant who committed a vast number of sex crimes in order to please himself – and only himself. “Perhaps more evidence will ultimately come to light,” Lindsay wrote, “but for now we’re left with copious evidence of Epstein trafficking to himself and no hard evidence that he trafficked to others.”

While that fact might seem to take the momentum out of “Epstein conspiracism [that] has now gone fully bipartisan,” Lindsay wrote, it shouldn’t. Congressional Democrats have “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hold the powerful to account,” she wrote, and they needn’t be “teetering on the edge of lunacy.”

“The real scandal of the Epstein saga is not that a billionaire cabal runs the world,” Lindsay said. “It’s that there is a billionaire class. The moral of the Epstein files is that nobody should be that rich.”

Lindsay Beyerstein is an investigative journalist who has not been seen in the pages of the Editorial Board lately, because she’s been working hard on a book about conspiracy theories as a political rejection of the Enlightenment. The working title is Against the Light: The Deep State Myth from the Illuminati to QAnon.

Here’s our conversation.

In your piece for Dissent, you establish that Epstein's sex crimes were his and his alone. That blows a hole in the conspiracy theories about him, from the right and the left.

It's only going to increase the level of paranoia. If this batch of files doesn't support their cherished conspiracy theories, true believers will insist the real secrets are still hidden. The truth is always just over the next hill. The circle of people who must be hiding the truth widens. You can hear grumbling on the forums about how politicians leading the charge for transparency are controlled opposition for the Epstein class, because they haven't produced the answers the conspiracists were looking for.

Pam Bondi was fired I think because she underestimated the power of the QAnon conspiracy theory that drove Trump back into office. If you’re right and Epstein did not pimp out to Trump, they’re still linked forever thanks to her. Whoops?

It's ironic, isn't it? Trump campaigned for the release of the Epstein files, which you wouldn't have expected him to do if he knew there was damning evidence against him therein. Maybe he figured his base was infinitely manipulable and that they'd believe Bondi's assurances. But he stoked a groundswell for accountability that he ultimately couldn't contain. The all-but unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act was the first true legislative revolt of his entire tenure as president.

There's no question Trump and Epstein did scummy stuff in the 1990s, like the time Trump threw a "pageant" of 28 girls that was just him and Epstein. I believe the claim by biographer Michael Wolff that he saw polaroids taken at Epstein's house of Trump and top---- women who were of what sex-crime investigators call "difficult age” (as in, difficult to tell how old they are.)

Trump is lucky that the Epstein files mostly cover events after 2004. That was the year that his friendship with Epstein ruptured over a mansion called La Maison de L'Amitié (aka the House of Friendship). Trump's also smart enough not to use email.

There may not be a QAnon conspiracy, but there is still a conspiracy. Your piece sketches one out. Billionaires could not exist without it. Epstein became Epstein by exploiting it.

Conspiracies are secret. In America, the accumulation of unlimited wealth is public gospel. We're supposed to admire these billionaires and defer to them. It's a national religion.

Thinking of this as a conspiracy of individuals makes it harder to think of the lawlessness of billionaires as a structural feature of our society. There are conspiracies, sure. But nobody has to scheme to achieve impunity for billionaires per se. If you have that much money you can paralyze the justice system, buy the media, dominate campaign spending, and do whatever you want.

Sorry to quote you at you but: "These are private companies that curate the lives and fortunes of the ultra-rich. They craft wills and trusts to dodge taxes. They invest the family’s money. They juggle their yachts, jets, and mansions. All their operations are cloaked in secrecy." Care to clarify?

Family offices are a great example of what happens when individual families control resources that rival those of small countries. Their operations are secret because their only client is the family. There are no shareholders, independent directors or regulators to answer to. And that money can buy anything from armed security to artistic treasures. As government has receded, they shape more of our lives by funding education, philanthropy, and even diplomacy and public policy through NGOs and think tanks. It's not one big conspiracy all pushing in one direction. The Kochs funded different stuff than Bill Gates did. But the billionaire class as a whole is shaping the world we all live in.

The Democrats are currently using language similar to what Trump used in 2024. "Massive cover up" is an example that comes to mind. What are the Democrats going to reveal when they gain power? That Epstein was merely a rich deviant? That takes the juice out of allegations against "the Epstein class."

If Democrats just echo the Trump rhetoric, the spiraling paranoia will discredit them the same way it discredited Trump. It's fine to call out the very real coverup that Trump and Bondi tried to execute, but there has to be more to it. Democrats need to propose measures to ensure greater accountability in the future, the way Senator Frank Church proposed sweeping reforms to the intelligence community in the 1970s. He didn't just expose the coverups, the boondoggles, and the atrocities. He helped usher in a whole package of reforms to rein in the American intelligence services. Democrats need to propose fixes to rein in the whole Epstein class so this doesn't happen again.

You suggest that the evil isn't a secret cabal. The evil is the existence of billionaires. (Evil is my word.) It would be great if that were the conclusion that most people came to, but as you say, that would run against the grain of our "national religion."

Supply-side crusaders have been preaching for decades that a rising tide lifts all boats and that people who are critical of massive socioeconomic inequality are just envious. A key premise of that argument is that a billionaire's wealth doesn't take anything away from anyone else. That's false. Massive inequalities in wealth create massive disparities in power, despite nominal legal equality. If you can afford to sink $100 million into a political campaign, your voice counts more than an ordinary voter's. We're not all equal before the law when some people can shrug off the heaviest fines like they're nothing or fight the legal system to a draw in the courts because money is no object.

It is not conspiratorial to suggest that the Washington press corps chose to help Donald Trump win the 2024 election by preventing most Americans from seeing the degree to which the former president had deteriorated mentally since leaving office.

Virtually all his public appearances and media interviews featured long stretches of incoherence as well as outright gibberish. That itself should have been the news, but it rarely was. Instead a gap formed between the real Trump and the Trump represented by the news media. That gap was so big it had a name: sanewashing.

We are now seeing the consequences of a cognitively impaired president – a democracy in tatters, a country at war, an economy on the brink – but that was the risk that the owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties were willing to take.

The decade leading up to the 2024 election featured social and political progress for women, Black people and people of color. The MeToo movement revealed the ugly reality of sexism. The country was rocked by a reckoning over institutional racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white cop. The pandemic empowered workers in ways largely unknown. Above all that was a president, Joe Biden, who put the government on the side of labor and the consumers who drive 70 percent of the economy.

These days we might call it a revolution against the Epstein class.

Which is why America’s cultural elites struck a bargain. He might be unfit mentally, and he might be dangerous politically, but it was better to have a second term for Donald Trump than a second term for a liberal administration that threatened to deepen gains made in the pursuit of liberty and justice for all.

America’s cultural elites needed a tool to smash the left.

Sure, he was deranged. Sure, he was a criminal and traitor. But the consequences of his reelection were unlikely to touch the elites while the consequences of the alternative very much would. So his liabilities were sanewashed and after he won, the press corps manufactured a consensus in which everything was going to be fine. The economy was good. Wokeism was defeated.

But here’s the odd thing. America’s cultural elites seem to actually believe their own propaganda. They seem to believe the reelection of Donald Trump was a correction, not only for America but for the media as well. They seem to believe that there really is a bias against white people and that once this bias is corrected, the news business will reap a populist windfall.

They’re wrong. There is no bias – anyway, not in the way they believe. That should be evident in the attempts to correct the “error” by the Washington Post, under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, and CBS News, under the leadership of Bari Weiss. Each has conspicuously reoriented their outfit toward the political right. The result has been a veritable bloodbath in lost profits.

That they are wrong is not evident, however, especially not to them. This alone is worth pondering. Many on the political left presume Bezos and Weiss are intentionally sabotaging the Post and CBS News. But, as Noah Berlatsky wrote recently, that’s more conspiracy than fact. They really do want to make money. Weiss in particular, Noah said, isn’t a saboteur. She’s just a losing loser.

I got in touch with Noah to talk about this and more, because I like him and because his newsletter is so insightful. It’s called Everything Is Horrible. Here’s the rest of our conversation.

You say Bezos and the Ellisons believe remaking their outlets in the mold of Fox will make them profitable. Yet they still believe that even after they have failed. In your view, why is that?

I think very wealthy people are surrounded by yes-men and are dazzled by their own success. They think they're brilliant and if their schemes go awry, it's someone else's fault or it's a sign of their willingness to think big, take risks, etc. Admitting they screwed up and are stupid would mean questioning whether they actually deserve all that power. Obviously, they can't do that.

You suggest that Weiss and the billionaires she represents think of themselves as tribunes of an authentic America. Will business failure correct that categorical error or nah?

I think that the wealthy are very reluctant to reassess their screw-ups. However, I do think that others watching them screw up are likely to become more skeptical of the idea that Trump and his billionaire cheering squad are the voice of the people.

You've already seen this I think as institutions have become more willing to fight and less willing to knuckle under, as it's become clear that Trump is not very popular. Disney and Kimmel were one example. More universities have started to push back. Democrats have become more willing to fight, etc.

What’s happening at CBS and others reflects the growing gap between media elites and normal people. It’s to the point now where Trump can claim victory in his war against Iran, and the press corps might choose to believe him, while consumers of the news watch the war burn up their wages. Will there be a correction at some point, as there would be on Wall Street?

The press has actually been pretty skeptical about the Iran war. There's some egregious cheerleading from people like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and other neoconservative hacks, but it's nothing like with the Iraq War. I don't think the press would just shrug and go along with it if Trump declares victory.

I think this is largely because the public is so against the war. Media elites can be disconnected, but they also do react to what their audience wants, especially when there's a lot of bipartisan consensus. A significant section of the Republican Party and right wing is very angry about the war, and that means that media outlets feel empowered to criticize it – which I think they have done, which makes the war less popular, which makes the media more willing to criticize it and so on. It's a virtuous circle.

After the election, there was a media consensus that believed that Joe Biden was the aberration, not Trump, and that Trump, in coming back, was a restoration of normalcy. That consensus depended on Biden’s economy becoming Trump’s. Now that Trump’s economy is cratering, will the consensus change?

I'm not sure that I agree that the return of Trump was exactly seen as normal. Trump's often seen as an exciting deviation from the norm, and I think a lot of the excitement in elite circles was created by the sense of a definitive break with the past — Trump, they all believed, would crush the left rabble once and for all.

I think that the sense of fascist optimism among the elites has obviously soured. I don't know that it's useful to think of Trump as abnormal or an aberration exactly, though. He's dominated US politics for 11 years. He is the status quo. He's what America has decided to be. I think that we need to grapple seriously with the fact that overturning that status quo is going to require some sweeping changes. We aren't just going to snap back to normal when Trump is gone. This is normal, god help us.

Why do some on the left see conspiracy when Weiss and the oligarchs’ business failures are more easily explained by greed, cowardice, incompetence and the abuse of power?

I take it you mean. Why do some on the left (and not just the left!) believe that Weiss wants CBS to fail? That is, why do they think she's destroying it out of malice rather than incompetence?

I think there's a couple of things. One is that Weiss, Bezos and so forth really do want to kneecap the ability of journalists to criticize the regime. So reducing capacity and immiserating good reporters is a plus from their perspective. They want to destroy the old version of the Washington Post and CBS News, and doing so has been at least a partial win.

Second, I think there's always kind of an impulse to see your enemies as more organized, more effective and more competent than your side is. Republicans do this too. They're always talking about how Democrats are laser-focused and ruthless, etc. It's just one way that negative partisanship works.

Finally, I think people are sometimes afraid to hope? I often think about Bill Paxton in Aliens where he shouts, "Game over, man! Game over!" You wish for the end because then you can check out and don't have to live the painful bits of the end with the aliens catching and eating you. Which is understandable that you would rather miss that part! But of course if you check out and just assume the enemy is unbeatable, you aren't exploiting their weaknesses or doing what you can to defeat them.

So, yeah, I do not think that the struggle for media is over at all. Bezos and CBS have had very significant humiliations and losses. NOTUS is expanding its Washington newsroom with a lot of ex-Post staff; ABC News and NBC News have benefited and their ratings are up. The dream of a popular maga mainstream media bonanza is pretty dead, which I think leaves space open for other dreams and other approaches.

Obviously we're still all living in a nightmare. But Weiss and Ellison getting humiliated is good. Take the win when you can.

United States Senator John Fetterman is not going to switch political parties. That’s not how politics works in America. While it’s true that the Democrat has seen his favorability rise among Pennsylvania Republicans, they are never going to vote for him. He’s a Democrat.

His fate will be decided by a Democratic primary in two years’ time. As of now, that fate looks increasingly bleak. According to CNN, Fetterman's net approval is negative 40 percent. That’s as low as any approval rating for any sitting senator that anyone has seen. Even former US Senator Kyrsten Sinema was more popular before Arizona Democrats hounded her out.

Fetterman believes the problem he is facing is “Trump Derangement Syndrome." Those are his words and by using them, he’s trying to get himself off the hook. While Pennsylvania Democrats expect him to vote with the Democratic Party, his record-low approval rating is not due to their hatred of Donald Trump, though I'm sure there’s no shortage of that.

It’s due to none other than John Fetterman. He campaigned in 2022 as the anti-moderate. He promised to be a reliable 51st vote. He mocked centrists for their mealymouthed excuses for caving to the Republicans. Yet here he is, voting with them in highly visible ways that are clearly intended to outrage Democrats who are in the mood to fight. His was the deciding vote to confirm Markwayne Mullin as the secretary of the Homeland Security Department.

Fetterman’s approval isn’t in the toilet because of the animosity of his supporters toward Trump. It’s in the toilet because he didn’t mean what he said. He sold himself as a man of principle who refused to engage in bad faith. He broke his promise, resulting in lost faith.

It’s tempting to attribute Fetterman's bad faith to the stroke he had in 2022, which was nearly fatal. But I think that also lets him off the hook. The signs were evident long ago in his decision to create for himself a regular-joe persona similar to those of his constituents in order to generate leverage over Republicans who were making inroads among working-class white voters. In reality, Fetterman’s background is one of considerable comfort and privilege.

That he shares more in common personally with Republican rivals than he does with actual working-class Pennsylvanians was invisible when he was Joe Biden’s surrogate in a critical swing state. But since 2024, when fellow Democrat and former US Senator Bob Casey lost reelection and Trump won Pennsylvania, Fetterman’s background has come back to the fore.

That he wore a suit and tie in order to greet Donald Trump before his State of the Union address in February, after succeeding in getting the Senate to change the rules of decorum so he could wear hoodies and shorts, can be seen as not a departure but a return to form.

Is that fair? Perhaps not, but the fact remains that John Fetterman’s case is a cautionary tale of sorts. There is a price to be paid by progressive Democratic candidates who do not keep their promises, or who turn out to be something that they said they would never be.

It’s the story of the price of bad faith.

Few know more about bad faith than Denny Carter. He’s the publisher of the Bad Faith Times, a newsletter I have profited from reading and encourage you to check out. In the following interview, we touch on Fetterman and the fighting mood that Democratic voters are in.

“People want vengeance. They want retribution. They want the DOGE boys to go to jail and they want Miller and Noem and Rubio and Hegseth and the rest to face severe consequences for their crimes. You're not getting any of that with the Schumer contingent in charge

I think Fetterman's days are numbered, but his shtick will endure, alas. When do you think Democrats will figure out that punching left is not going to accomplish what it used to?

You can't dismiss the effects of his stroke. His policy stances and his demeanor have changed dramatically since then. Profiles and insider accounts have painted the picture of a man who is no longer operating the way he did before his stroke.

I wrote about Fetterman's campaign in 2022, because it was one of the first campaigns to refuse to engage in the right's bad faith around abortion rights and gun control and taxes and other issues that sometimes prove disastrous for Democrats.

His current shtick – which mostly involves being obstinate for the sake of being obstinate, and triggering the libs just for the fun of it -- wasn't his shtick when he headed into his Senate term.

Fetterman reportedly cares a lot about what his father thinks (I think a lot of men can relate to that) and longs for his dad's approval. Fetterman's father, a rightwinger who mainlines Fox, reportedly praises him when he sides with Trump against Democrats. I think that explains a lot about what drives him to essentially function as a Republican in some instances. (Fetterman still votes with the Democratic Party at an 80 percent clip).

Punching left, I think, will become a lot less common among congressional Democrats in whatever comes after Trump. The Democratic base has been very clear about what it wants, and it has nothing to do with bipartisanship. Part of me thinks it's not so much punching left as it is punching those who want Democrats to fight the authoritarians tearing apart the country.

For now, it's not so much about where you stand on Medicare for All as it is about whether you will deliver justice against the monsters robbing the country and terrorizing Americans.

Fetterman has been clear that he will not be part of that Fight Caucus. Maybe because daddy would be disappointed.

Some progressives want to see more progressives in the Democratic Party while normie Democrats tend to see Fetterman as a wolf in sheep's clothing. The same thing is happening with Graham Platner in Maine. How do you see people on the left resolving this tension?

I'm not sure that tension will be resolved no matter how the midterms turn out. A big part of the appeal of guys like Fetterman and Platner is that they are physically imposing men who talk tough. The Democratic base – along with anyone paying even passing attention to the regime's crimes – is in the mood for fighting. It makes sense that big men capture their attention. Of course, this ignores a lot of determined women candidates who fight but don't look like they could step into a UFC cage.

I will point out that Governor Janet Mills, Platner's opponent, last year stood up to Trump in person and told him to f--- all the way off with his threats around defunding Maine schools if they did not abide by his regime's anti-trans executive orders.

We talk a lot about bad faith among Republicans, but perhaps not enough about it among progressives. Fetterman isn't working class, but his persona is based on the idea that he's authentic (ie working class). Thoughts?

I suppose politicians pretending they are working class is nothing new. Almost all of them come from extreme wealth. It's the only way one can run for office anymore. Fetterman and Platner have taken this art to a new level, though. You'd think they were punching a time clock between campaign appearances. They both look like absolute hell, which can be (very) appealing to actual working class folks. Politics is a game. It's theater. You dress the way you need to dress and say what you need to say to get elected. That's no different today than it was during the Obama years or the early 2000s or the Clinton era. A guy like Platner definitely understands the WWE aspect of politics, horrifying tattoos and all. That makes him formidable.

My feeling is that Platner is succeeding because he's the podcasters' idea of an authentic working-class American, even though Platner and the podcasters come from the same elite backgrounds: born into affluence, attended elite schools, etc. They all know it's a game, but I think the goal is real: taking over the Democrats. I welcome you pushing back on that.

That's not a bad theory. I don't know if the entire podcasting class comes from privilege, though. I think they find common ground in committing to the end of the Schumer era and all that entails. Again, I don't know if this necessarily has to do with so-called left policies as much as it does about empowering elected officials who won't hesitate to imprison their enemies when they commit crimes against the nation and its people.

Chuck Schumer and the current Democratic leadership have proven unwilling to breach that barrier, as we saw in the months after January 6. The thinking among the pro-Platner, faux-working class podcasting folks might be this: Secure power by any means necessary and remake the Democratic Party into a pro-democracy organization that will punish those who have run roughshod over constitutional governance.

People want vengeance. They want retribution. They want the DOGE boys to go to jail and they want Miller and Noem and Rubio and Hegseth and the rest to face severe consequences for their crimes. You're not getting any of that with the Schumer contingent in charge.

The president is out of control. The Iranians have the advantage. The Israelis are unleashed. Allies are outraged and alienated. The most Donald Trump can do right now is lie with everything he's got in the hopes that markets believe him and keep the price of oil down.

That appears to be the entire point of last night’s “update” – to quell any nascent feelings of panic. In the days leading up to the primetime address, he hinted hard that the end was coming. Indeed, at 3:28 pm eastern time, Politico ran this credulous but reassuring headline: “‘I came, I saw, I conquered’: Trump set to claim victory in Iran at primetime address.”

Then he didn’t. The war, he said, is “nearing completion” and would take another “two to three weeks.” In response this morning, stocks fell and oil prices soared, reaching $110 per barrel, on Trump’s vow “to escalate attacks on Iran,” in the words of the Associated Press.

By now, it should be a familiar pattern. Trump has been saying the war is winding down virtually since the beginning of it. He knows markets want it to. He knows that if he doesn’t end it soon, gas prices will keep rocketing. He knows rocketing gas prices will vaporize whatever advantage his party has in the run-up to this year’s congressional elections. He knows that if the Democrats take the House, he faces a world of endless, grinding exposure.

At the same time, Trump can’t end it. Israel is neither going to stop its imperialist agenda (it invaded southern Lebanon) nor is it going to stop attacking Iran for the purpose of killing its leadership. US allies in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, where Trump is heavily invested, want the war to continue. They prefer a US ground invasion to overthrow the regime.

Iran’s regime is also not going to stop. It will continue to choke off the supply of oil at the Strait of Hormuz to hurt Trump while boosting sales of its own oil to China. It has established a tribute system in which “friendly” countries can pay a toll or suffer the consequences. Tolling offers an incentive for insurers. They would rather see a $100 million tanker carrying $200 million in oil pay a 1 percent tax than see it sinking to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

Even if the president were not a colossal moron surrounded by yes-men, he’d still be stuck. (If none of those things were true, he would not have gone to war.) The best thing he can do is kick the can down the road, which is to say, lie: extend the time frame by another two weeks, continuously imply that the war is ending, that Iran is defeated, that NATO is ungrateful, and so on, in a desperate hope that everyone will buy the “reality” he’s selling.

But Trump knows everyone won’t buy it. On Wednesday, Politico reported that the current price of oil (about $100 per barrel) is “a baseline” for the White House. They expect it to keep going up. Politico said they are not “ruling out the possibility of prices rising as high as $200 per barrel.” That would put the national average price of gas at around $8 (or diesel at $12).

Paul Krugman reminded us that gas prices are only half the story. The effect of the Strait of Hormuz under lockdown will be felt in the price of “diesel, jet fuel, fertilizer and plastics.” Who pays the cost? Producers at first, but it will “quickly be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for shipping and, indirectly, almost everything you buy,” Krugman said.

What would the world look like with $200 a barrel? asked journalist Jesus Servulo Gonzalez. In that hypothetical scenario, he said, “the economy would enter a recession, triggering an inflationary crisis that would severely impact citizens’ finances and businesses’ bottom lines.

"The world would become poorer and economic activity would grind to a halt.”

Trump made an appeal last night. He said the war is part of a “future investment in your children’s and grandchildren’s future.” In his incoherent way, the president was offering a kind of bargain – a little personal economic security in exchange for national security.

That, however, flies in the face of the existing deal, which was trading democracy and the institutions of democracy in exchange for economic security. On MS Now this morning, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said that many people in the last election chose to swap their “discomfort in what he does to our national institutions for a better economy.

“A majority, or overwhelming majority, of Americans do not like the way he conducts himself in office,” he said. “They do not like what he’s done to our institutions, but they were willing to make a trade for their family’s economic security. When they’re not getting that, they’re gonna abandon ship and that’s what you see them doing in the poll numbers right now.”

A new CNN poll found that just 27 percent approve of Trump’s handling of inflation.

Donald Trump was never going to live up to his end of the bargain with the American people, just as he was never going to live up to the promises made by previous presidents to maintain order in the Middle East to ensure safe passage of the world’s supply of oil.

So far, the lies have been working. Markets have shown a stunning willingness to believe him when he says the end of the war is around the corner. But the lies may soon stop working.

While the average price of gas is currently $4.07, Gasbuddy’s Patrick De Haan told Reuters the pain will get worse soon. “US average retail gasoline prices are now set to climb to between $4.25 and $4.45 a gallon by next week after crossing $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022,” Reuters said. "If there is no viable plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the US average price of gasoline ⁠will likely cross $5 a gallon and hit record levels within a month.”

There is no plan, of course – not one that will actually reopen the strait and restore order. It's too late for that. All Iran has to do to spook insurers is sink one tanker a month and it can do that even if the president were to order ground forces to occupy key portions of that strait.

But the built-in failure of an invasion wouldn't be apparent for a long. Meanwhile, Trump could use the fog of war, especially troop casualties, as cover for stringing along markets, giving investors just enough hope to keep oil prices down until it becomes obvious to everyone that the mission could not from the start accomplish what Trump said it would.

But by then, Trump will have moved on to the next lie.

During a primetime address last night, the president provided an “update” on the state of his war against Iran. Oil prices fell and stock rose on the expectation that the conflict will end.

It’s not going to.

Yes, I know what Donald Trump says.

In an interview, he said, “we're going to be out pretty quickly." He said Iran “won't have a nuclear weapon because they are incapable of that ⁠now.” He said “we have had full regime change.” He said there’s “a very good chance that ⁠we'll make a deal.”

In fact, there is no regime change. Hardliners now have complete control. There won’t be a deal. Iran has shown no interest in one. It has denied Trump’s repeated claims of ongoing talks. US forces won’t leave, because they are entrenched in the region. The war will continue to rage no matter what the president says tonight.

Trump might declare victory, according to a Rapidan Energy Group brief (which I found via Carl Quintanilla), but he “will struggle.” Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. It still controls highly enriched uranium. Israel will still continue its attacks. Iran will still retaliate against Israel and the surrounding Gulf states. “A clean US disengagement [is] structurally difficult,” it said.

As for nukes, the problem doesn’t end with Iran. Trump has opened a new chapter of nuclear proliferation, as small nations like Poland, South Korea and Saudi Arabia can no longer trust the US to act as a deterrent against Russia, North Korea and Iran.

The markets might be misreading the president, badly. This morning, I interviewed a career intelligence analyst who goes by the Bluesky handle Shipwreck. He thinks it’s unlikely that Trump will announce the war’s end. Instead, he thinks it’s more likely he will announce its escalation. The goal, he said, might be placing ground troops on islands in the strait to reopen it to shipping.

How long and bloody would that be? I asked.

“The operation wouldn’t be as bad as the holding period, where Iran would likely fire short-range ballistic missiles and drones at our forces.”

Sitting ducks? I asked.

“Kind of,” he said, “we would have air cover and would pound any sites that fired, but yeah, not good.”

Whatever happens, Shipwreck said, there is no walking away.

“We won’t walk and can’t,” he said. “It amazes me how bad the markets can be at reading some geopolitical things. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps runs the show. They are fanatics and don’t care about repercussions. They were founded and based on maximalist ideals. They will fight to the death and will not surrender. Even if Trump said ‘mission accomplished’ tonight and it’s over, which I doubt, Iran and Israel are not stopping.”

Here’s the rest of my interview with Shipwreck.

Is the Rapidan report right?

If we leave without control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will make it painful for everyone. And yes Israel will likely continue actions against Iran with or without the US.

How painful?

Painful, as in painful cost. They will charge a fee and restrict movement to try to keep oil at a high rate, largely with the intent of recouping some funds back from the war. They will likely only allow “friendly countries” to move. Iran’s whole goal is to enact an economic cost, because they can’t do it militarily.

For how long? How motivated are they?

Very motivated, as long as needed. To keep pressure on the Strait of Hormuz, a few drone hits on ships or small boat swarms will keep insurance high and likely keep ships away. Without being under pressure of attack by the US or Israel, they could keep it up for as long as they see fit. They would avoid angering China or other major exporters and just keep harassing US and western ships. Look at how the Houthis effectively closed the Bab al-Mandab Strait for months by just the threat and a few hits.

I imagine a situation where a strait that isn’t open and safe will slow traffic and raise prices. The insurance issue is a big one. Even a partially open strait causes problems. See the Houthis in the Red Sea. I don’t see energy prices coming down any time soon, so likely a long tail of pain even when this thing enters a calmer phase. The key is “phase.” The length of those will vary. Markets don’t like the unknown and we are heading for that.

Will Trump declare victory tonight? If so, is it a victory?

I don’t think he will declare victory. I’m leaning towards him announcing actions with US ground forces in the strait. It seems like two to three weeks more at minimum based on force movements. There will be no victory. The hardliners now run Iran. We are set up for years of periods of hostility with breaks for calm. Think pre-October 7 in Israel with the proxies.

To be clear, you think he's going to announce an invasion?

Maybe, but more likely he will announce the next phase, which could include ground operations. Again, I have no insight, just basing it on assessments and force movements. He is very difficult to judge. I brief every morning and it’s always an adventure in trying to understand US policy and actions.

What would the next phase look like?

US strikes followed by Iranian counter-action against Israel and the Gulf states, with sporadic closures of the strait. Then periods of calm with hybrid actions. Possibly proxy actions, depending on how long it takes Iran to get them running again. Honestly, the end state for Iran is developing a nuke and following the North Korean model. They know a nuke at this point is the only deterrent. They will do everything they can to achieve it.

The ground invasion will more likely occur in the strait, taking islands but not in Iran proper. It’s too risky but not impossible to carry out actions deep in Iran. We tried it once and it failed miserably, see Operation Eagle Claw. The ground invasion is the wildcard, but if it occurs, it will be to open the strait.

The markets seem to be expecting Trump to walk away.

We won’t walk and can’t. It amazes me how bad the markets can be at reading some geopolitical things, especially in Iran. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps runs the show. They are fanatics and don’t care about repercussions. They were founded and based on maximalist ideals. They will fight to the death and will not surrender. Even if he said “mission accomplished” tonight and it’s over, which I doubt, Iran and Israel are not stopping.

What about allies? Are the Gulf states going to keep trusting Trump given that Iran is going to throttle the strait?

The Gulf states were initially hesitant, but now they have hardened and are fully backing the destruction of the Iranian regime. They are another piece of all of this, and why we can’t just walk away. The Gulf states really have no choice but to stay with the US. They lack the military to do anything significant.

What about allies in Europe and Asia? Trump has triggered what looks to be a global recession. Are they going to continue trusting Trump to take care of Iran? Seems unlikely.

Europe clearly wants no part of this. They are likely trying to straddle the fence in order to be able to get oil out of the strait if Trump decides to bail. No one trusts Trump, but everyone needs the US over the long term. They’re walking a fine line.

It seems like nuclear proliferation is going to restart. Trump wants out of NATO. Iran is going to seek a bomb. Small countries can't trust the US to deter big countries. Even Poland is talking about making nukes. Is this Pandora's box opening?

Yes, and add Saudi Arabia to the list if Iran gets a nuke. Others in the region may also try. It’s the second- and third-order impacts that people fail to grasp in these large geopolitical events.

I think we have to accept the truth. We are going to pay, and we are going to continue to pay, for the president’s war of choice against Iran. Such are the consequences of politics. Maybe Americans will take their democracy seriously next time.

If Donald Trump walks away from this war, things won’t go back to normal. Over the weekend, the AP confirmed reporting from elsewhere that Iran has established a tribute system through the Strait of Hormuz. It is charging as much as $2 million for safe passage of each oil tanker, payable in Chinese currency (yuan). That “toll,” as it’s being called, will be passed on to consumers.

But if Donald Trump escalates the war, things will also not go back to normal. Reports suggest that he’s thinking about invading Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil depot. The idea may be to take it and use it to negotiate terms of a ceasefire, but no one really knows.

In any case, escalation will not restore the flow of oil through the strait. All Iran has to do is sink a few tankers, as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis said, with “anti-ship cruise missiles that could be fired off the back of a pickup truck that can go 100.”

Sink a few tankers that are worth about $100 million each and scare off anyone who’s willing to insure them. That means oil slows to a trickle, prices keep going up and we all look on in despair as our incomes are drained away. (Bloomberg reported over the weekend that the price of gas might be the least of our concerns as we may not be able to find any gas to pay more for.)

Walking away from the war would also do nothing to stop Israel from continuing to invade Iran’s allies or from attacking Iran. It would do nothing to stop Iran from attacking neighboring US-allied Gulf states in retaliation for Israel’s continued assault. As long as there’s conflict, insurers won’t insure, and if insurers won’t insure, expect to see oil climb to $200 a barrel, according to Bloomberg, which puts the average price of gas at around $8.

To recap, if Trump walks away, we pay. If he escalates, we pay. We pay for the toll or we pay for the scarcity. (Or we can’t find any gas to pay more for.) Again, Americans could have taken their democracy seriously when deciding whether to elect a convicted felon who already screwed up the first time he was president. But we as a people did not do that. The consequence is that we pay.

Meanwhile, the president we elected keeps lying about the end of the war in the hopes that traders will believe him and keep down the price of oil. He has done this repeatedly, and the question has been: how long are investors going to trust the gap between what Trump is saying about the war and what’s actually happening?

To find the answer to that and more, I got in touch with Patrick Watson, a senior economic analyst for Mauldin Economics. I have turned to him often whenever I need answers on the state of the economy. I asked Patrick if Trump’s war is reorganizing the world. He said yes – if the war does not come to an end soon.

That “requires re-opening the strait, which means Iran has to be either defeated or convinced to stop threatening ships,” he said.

What happens if this war doesn't end and the oil shipments do not return to normal? Five-dollars-a-gallon gas permanently?

“Permanently” is a strong word. Oil and oil-derived fuel prices will stay elevated until either the supply interruption eases or demand drops enough to restore balance. Those are both slow processes, but they will happen.

The problem is that the longer this war drags on, the longer it will take to repair the infrastructure that’s damaged or destroyed. The oil industry was already reluctant to invest in new drilling because it can see renewable energy growing so fast. With the rest of the world producing oil at close to full capacity, it could be a long time before we get much help on the supply side.

Demand is harder to assess. Recessions typically reduce fuel demand as people travel less, companies ship less stuff around and so on. To the extent this war reduces global economic growth, we could see supply and demand come back into balance over a year or two. But that would be doing it the hard way.

Donald Trump is lying to ease market fears. That’s very clear. But for how long will investors choose to believe the president?

I talk to Republican business owners and investors all the time. Off the record, many will say they don’t especially like Trump, nor do they believe everything he says, but they still choose him over any Democrat. The economic term for this is “ordinal preference.” You can call it “choose your poison.” They think Trump, for all his problems, is less poisonous than the alternative. So they keep supporting him even when they don’t believe him.

Of course, the problem with this is there’s no bottom. No matter what Trump does, the response is “the Democrats would do worse.” That means they can’t abandon him. They may grumble but that’s as far as it goes. It’s a permission structure to excuse anything. Maybe at some point, they’ll lose enough money to reconsider. But I don’t think we are near that point.

Inflation is already high due to Trump's tariffs. Some say the manufacturing and agriculture sectors are already in a recession. How long would it take for higher than normal gas prices to push the rest of the economy into a recession?

Inflation leads to recession when prices get high enough to reduce aggregate demand. In an energy shock, that would mean people are spending so much more on gasoline that they have to reduce other spending. They eat out less often, so restaurants lose business. They keep the old car a year longer instead of buying a new one. All those little decisions add up.

The wrinkle this time is that today’s economy is far less energy-intensive than it used to be. Gasoline is more expensive, yes, but as a percentage of the typical household’s spending, the higher price may not change their behavior. The danger will come when the fuel prices show up in other things.

Food production and distribution require a lot of fuel, for example. Airline tickets are another example. But the big companies hedge their expenses, locking in prices months or years in advance. So this is another slow process. It depends on how the war unfolds, but I think recession is still some time away.

Most attention is on gas prices, but fertilizer is another issue. Much of it goes through the Strait of Hormuz. What happens if supply is throttled? What can be done if the war continues?

The war is affecting more than oil and gas exports. The Gulf countries are also unable to ship things like sulfuric acid, which is necessary for refining copper, or the helium that’s used in microchip production and MRI machines. These are much smaller markets than oil, but they’re critical in certain sectors.

Fertilizer is a problem, because you need natural gas to produce ammonia. The Haber-Bosch process that enables this literally revolutionized global agriculture a century ago. This war is now incinerating our supply of the key component. Worse, a lot of the other capacity is in Russia and China. In time, fertilizer production could shift to places with more secure natural gas supplies. But fertilizer prices will probably rise a lot in the meanwhile, and it will flow through to food prices.

Trump has reorganized the world but doesn't know it, right?

It could turn out that way if Gulf shipping stays frozen. Other governments and businesses have to work around this disruption. If Trump forces them to adjust to new ways, they may not go back to the old ones. That will have effects far beyond energy. Averting this requires re-opening the strait, which means Iran has to be either defeated or convinced to stop threatening ships. That’s a very high standard because ships don’t sail without insurance, and insurers don’t write coverage in active war zones.

Maybe it’s not the best analogy but I compare this to the Vietnam War. Back then, all our carpet bombings didn’t compel surrender because the Viet Cong could simply retreat into their tunnels and pop up somewhere else. Similarly, the IRGC has little missile and drone units spread over thousands of square miles. They don’t have to sink any ships; occasional near misses are enough to stop the flow. Removing this threat will be tough. Also worth noting that most of those ships are going to Asia, not the US. That’s where the economy will suffer first. It will spread globally, though, unless this somehow ends soon.

The Democrats in the Congress held the line and won. So far, that’s the story of the fight over the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). They told the Republicans they can have funding for DHS but not Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Or they can have funding for all of DHS, including ICE, but with major reforms to ICE.

The Republicans said no to both proposals for weeks, during which time airports nationwide descended into chaos. Employees at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were working without pay. Over time, they called out sick so much that lines were growing to five and six hours long. At least one plane crashed as a consequence of the shutdown.

The mess was getting so messy that last weekend, Senate Republicans went to the president with a deal. The Democrats would fund all of DHS but not ICE. Airports would return to normal. The GOP would get a chance to secure ICE funding later. But Donald Trump said no. He said he would agree if the Democrats supported unrelated legislation called the SAVE Act.

But the president didn’t stop there with his unrealistic demands. To create what he believed was leverage over the Democrats, he dispatched ICE agents to airports around the country. It was reported that they were “assisting” the TSA, but in reality, Trump was trying to bully the Democrats, especially Chuck Schumer, into giving him everything he wanted.

The Senate minority leader stood firm, though. Despite the implicit expectation by the Washington press corps that he would surrender to Trump's demands for the sake of the country, he outmaneuvered Trump by arranging a series of votes in which Senate Democrats made clear their intention to restore order at airports by funding all of DHS, except for ICE.

Meanwhile, pressure was building, especially on the president. His remedy of sending ICE agents to “assist” the TSA was transparently bogus as ICE agents stood around doing nothing in full view of people waiting in line for hours. Moreover, Connecticut Congresswoman Rose DeLauro (my representative) got the TSA's administrator to confirm that DHS had made the decision to pay ICE, Border Patrol, the Secret Service and Coast Guard but not TSA workers.

Until Thursday, the Senate Republicans could still plausibly blame Schumer and the Democrats, but all such plausibility went out the window last night after Trump claimed for himself imaginary emergency powers to fund the TSA without the Congress. He said he was going to sign an “executive order” to “immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports.”

No one seems to know what he was talking about. Executive orders claiming the authority to pay for things without an act of Congress would not only be illegal and unconstitutional but “anti-constitutional,” said Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Georgetown. “They strike at the core of one of the principles that allows our entire constitutional order to function.”

But before anyone had a chance to figure out what Trump was saying, or whether to debate it, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, in the wee hours of Friday morning, brought a bill to fund DHS, but not ICE. It passed by voice vote, according to the Post, “with only a handful of senators in the chamber.” Chuck Schumer stood firm and won. The bill is now in the House.

Schumer did not get the ICE reforms that the Democrats wanted, including a ban on agents wearing masks and a requirement that they follow warrants signed by a judge, not an official in the administration. But forcing the Senate Republicans to cave is a victory when Senate Democrats usually cave. It's arguably the best sign yet that the party establishment understands the need to fight. Even a squish like Schumer may have internalized that Trump's power comes from the willingness of his enemies to defeat themselves.

For over a year, Schumer has been the subject of intense scrutiny by the Democratic base. During the last shutdown, in November, he engineered a surrender before Thanksgiving. It was a situation similar to what we have seen this week in which air travelers were stressed. Because of that history, many liberals expected Schumer to surrender again. Yet he didn’t.

But if there’s newfound strength in the Democrats, it’s because there’s newfound weakness in the Republicans, especially the president. By deciding to go it alone – again – and declaring for himself the authority to pay TSA workers on his own, he was met immediately with the question of why, if he could do it by himself the whole time, he didn’t from the start.

In effect, he sabotaged his own party’s negotiating position. Thune could have kept blaming the Senate Democrats for the airport chaos. He might have worn Chuck Schumer down, and perhaps he would have succeeded. He will never know, however, because the leader of his party threw away what little leverage he had. And without it, the House Republican leadership can do little but complain about the fact that the Senate Democrats didn’t cave.

Indeed, the House Republicans are experiencing what can only be called disarray. Speaker Mike Johnson rejected the Senate bill, calling it “a joke.” He said the House would vote on its own DHS funding bill. He said there’s only one party that’s treating Americans like “pawns.”

An hour later, the AP reported that Trump signed the executive order claiming for himself the authority to pay TSA workers. While that is dubious, legally and constitutionally, it still raises the question: if Donald Trump has the power to do this now, why didn’t he use it back then? If he had the power, why make Thune and Johnson jump through hoops?

Someone is treating someone like pawns and those someones are Trump and the Republicans. (Whether TSA workers are actually paid appears to be an open question.)

But Trump’s weak bargaining power has deeper roots. As I mentioned in Tuesday’s edition, his decision to dispatch ICE agents to airports was a strongman’s decision – if the Congress can’t fix the problem, he’ll fix it himself. But doing so not only made the problem worse. It revealed the strongman’s impotence. ICE agents mostly stood around doing nothing.

At the same time, his decision made clear to a class of Americans that is not usually exposed to the consequences of politics – affluent white people – that they will feel the consequences of politics given enough time. Elect a man who believes that every problem requires him to “be strong” and get a president who is so incompetent that he sabotages his own party.

Donald Trump held another one of those televised meetings today during which the cabinet secretaries take turns pandering to him. It was obscene, per usual, but also oddly affirming.

Why? Because I think it demonstrated something that the Secretary of Defense Rock told me yesterday. (He’s the anonymous publisher of History Does You, a newsletter about the intersection of military and civilian life.) SODR told me that Trump may think he’s winning the Iran war, because “his briefings are essentially CENTCOM highlight-reels.” Watch enough stuff getting blown up, he said, and you too might think you’re winning a war you’re losing.

In today’s cabinet meeting, Trump referred repeatedly, as he often does, to the damage being done by US forces. He’s titanically self-centered and surrounded by yes-men. That might result in him believing that "the conflict is in its final stages," as the Wall Street Journal said.

Of course, it’s not in its final stages. The Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz. They are turning it into a tribute system. They said there will not be “any negotiations.” Hardliners are now demanding a restart to the nuclear bomb program. Trump can quit when they say so. Meanwhile, the price of gas in the US keeps going up, with a recession or worse in the offing.

There is, as one expert put it today, a conspicuous gap between what’s the president is saying about the war and what's actually happening, and the gap is getting wider by the day. “Are we deescalating? Or is this just an illusion? Or a ruse? If it is, for what? And even if there is some deal on the horizon, would President Trump actually take it? Would the regime?”

Whatever the case, investors who have kept their faith in the president lost it today. “Stocks had their worst day since the war with Iran started, as doubt took over again from hope on Wall Street about a possible end to the conflict,” according to the Associated Press.

The S&P 500 fell 1.7 percent. The index is headed for a fifth straight losing week, which would be the longest such losing streak in almost four years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1 percent, and the Nasdaq composite sank 2.4 percent. They’re the latest flip-flops for financial markets this week after Iran rejected a US offer for a ceasefire. Oil prices rose more than 4 percent, and Treasury yields climbed in the bond market.

But the problem is deeper than a moron easily impressed by CENTCOM videos. “At a more fundamental level, the problem appears to be the absence of a coherent strategy altogether,” the Secretary of Defense Rock said. From that, he added, arises “the illusion of coherence.”

I didn’t include the following interview material with the Secretary of Defense Rock in yesterday’s edition, because the edition was getting too long. I’m publishing it today, because it explains the organizational breakdown between where the war began and where it’s going.

The Secretary of Defense Rock said:

The individual responsible for defining political objectives [ie, the president] either has not articulated them clearly or lacks a settled conception of what success actually looks like. In that vacuum, the rest of the system is left to infer intent rather than execute it. Subordinates, whether planners, commanders, or staff, begin interpreting fragments, signals, and impulses, trying to reverse-engineer a strategy from ambiguous guidance.

The result is predictable. In the absence of clear political direction, organizations default to what they can control, which is tactics. Operations become ends in themselves rather than instruments of policy. Units execute strikes, maneuvers, or shaping actions not because they are tightly linked to a defined strategic objective, but because they are feasible, familiar, and measurable. Activity substitutes for purpose.

This dynamic creates the illusion of coherence. From the outside, it can look like a deliberate campaign with phased objectives when in reality it is a collection of loosely connected actions driven by local logic rather than overarching design. Tactical success in this environment risks becoming strategically meaningless or even counterproductive because there is no clear framework that ties battlefield outcomes to political effects.

I was surprised. Though Donald Trump is the weakest president of my lifetime, in terms of principle and character, I didn't think he would set himself up to prove that to the world.

Yet that’s what he did. The president issued an ultimatum to the Iranians via a social media post. Open the Strait of Hormuz in the next 48 hours or the US will “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure. Open it up, he said Saturday, “without threat … from this exact point in time.”

The Iranians responded immediately with a threat of its own. If the president followed through, they would target the energy infrastructure of all the countries surrounding it, thus deepening the global energy crisis that Trump started when he unilaterally attacked Iran.

By early Monday, Trump said JK JK.

Of course, he didn’t say it like that. Via a social media post, again, the president said that, since issuing his 48-hour ultimatum, the US and Iran have been in talks regarding the “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.”

“BASED ON ... THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS," he said.

But there are no talks. “Remarks by the US president are part of efforts to reduce energy prices and buy time to implement his military plans,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry said. “While there have been initiatives by regional countries to de-escalate tensions, Iran’s response has been clear: It did not start the war and all such requests should be directed to Washington.”

So to recap: Trump issues a threat. Iran issues its own. He backs down, but lies about it. Iran says hoo boy, that man's a lair, then explains why he’s lying, turning itself into an honest broker standing in stark contrast to a world leader who’s lost control of a war he started.

In the mind of this president, what does it take to win? Whether the question is “illegal aliens,” international trade or military conflict, the answer is always the same: “be strong.”

“We have to be strong,” Donald Trump said last month during the annual State of the Union address, “because hopefully we will seldom have to use this great power that we built together. It’s really called peace through strength. That has been very, very effective.”

Yet here we are. Trump is trying to do to Iran what he does to friends and allies, at home and abroad, but he’s realizing that he can’t bully a highly determined enemy. If there is peace – if he quits his war – it will be through weakness, not strength. Little Iran will have proved it.

While every day brings new evidence of Trump’s weakness, the last three have been head-spinning. Before the clock on his ultimatum had run out, he said “now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent Democrat Party!”

Then there's this sequence of events compiled by Gold and Geopolitics:

Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.

Some say he’s manipulating markets. I think that’s correct but in a narrow sense. It’s the only move he has right now. With the strait, Iran has him over a barrel. To keep the "economic pain" from rising to intolerable levels, he has to lie. And for now, the lies seem to be working.

But I also think the sheer volume of lies and chaos compels us to look behind the usual explanations. Yes, he’s manipulating markets. Yes, as I will never tire of saying, he’s the weakest president ever. But we’re now talking about more than just weakness of character. We’re not talking about weakness of the brain. The commander-in-chief is 79 years old.

Former General Paul Eaton, who trained combat troops during the Iraq War, said watching him consider a possible ground invasion to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was like watching a “malignant narcissist who is drifting into a state of dementia that is difficult to manage.”

MS Now’s Matt Fuller said that if the age question applied to Joe Biden, it applies to Trump. “The reason Biden’s age was a fair topic is because it spoke to his capacity to make big decisions — about war and peace, about our economy, about the direction of our country. So given Trump’s recent behavior, why isn’t there more discussion about his capacity?”

Iker Seisdedos is the Washington-based correspondent for El Pais, a Spanish newspaper that also publishes in English. He interviewed three cognitive specialists. They all told him that “the deterioration of [Biden and Trump] is not comparable. The argument essentially boils down to this: Biden was aging, very much and very quickly; Trump is developing dementia.”

But setting aside the question of the president's cognitive decline, and the question of why the Washington press corps continues to overlook his increasingly obvious deficits, I think we know the story that Donald Trump would tell if a Democratic president were in his shoes.

The old and weak president is losing, because he’s old and weak.

“We have to be strong,” he would say.

White House advisor Stephen Miller is a liar, but he did tell the truth one time. Well, he said something with truth hidden inside it, but you had to squint. Of course, he was projecting.

During a recent Oval Office meeting, Miller accused immigrants of theft. Once Donald Trump’s deportation measures were fully in place, “all of this theft” would stop and “it would be enough to balance the budget.” He said: “The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don't belong here is the primary cause of the national debt."

See what I mean? Projection.

In reality, the people who are extracting wealth from the American taxpayer are not the poor bastards who clean toilets, butcher chickens and cut grass (and pay income taxes). They are the moneyed elites who are running the country for the moneyed elites. Blaming immigrants is just part of their scam.

The primary cause of the national debt is a president who has created conditions in which the burden for paying for a civilized country is pushed downward toward the bottom of the class hierarchy. His tax cuts for “the people that I love,” as he put it during the State of the Union, are going to add nearly $5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

To offset that historic loss of revenue, Donald Trump is cutting government services, like health care, nursing home subsidies, food stamps and so on. He’s also raising taxes on the rest of us in the form of tariffs (import taxes). Before the Supreme Court stepped in, he was aiming to extract from workaday Americans two-thirds of the tax money that moneyed elites used to pay.

Trump can’t tax us like that anymore, thanks to the Supreme Court, but neither can he ask the money elites to pay what they used to. So he’s going to use a different tariff authority but with the same goal – extracting wealth from the American people.

The extraction of wealth is now so normal as to be invisible among those who created the conditions for it. When asked about the economic effects of Trump’s war, Kevin Hassett, the National Economic Council director, said he wasn’t worried.

“If the war were to be extended,” Hassett said, “it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about what we'd have to do about that, but that's really the last of our concerns right now." Translation: “the economy” isn’t consumers. It’s the moneyed elites. As long as the president is around, they’ll be fine.

Consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of the US economy, which brings me to another aspect of extraction. In addition to paying illegal taxes, consumers pay higher prices on everything because of those illegal taxes. Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said inflation is still 1 percent higher than the central bank’s target rate, because a “big chunk of that, between a half and three-quarters, is actually tariffs.”

Due to inflation being as high as it is, Powell said he’s concerned about the “very, very low level of job creation." He then added: “There's zero net job creation in the private sector. But actually, that looks like that's about what the economy needs, in terms of dealing with very, very low — nonexistent, really — growth in the labor force, which of course we've never had in our history."

There’s been zero job growth for the last six months, Powell said. (While manufacturing jobs exploded during the Biden era, tariffs have decimated the sector. Indeed, the facts are so clear and uncontested that the AP ran this headline: “Trump’s tariffs are hurting American manufacturers instead of helping them.” Their effect on farming is arguably worse. A survey found that 75 percent of farmers believe the crop sector is in a recession.)

In addition to wealth extraction is labor extraction, namely the president’s criminal deportation program. (By “criminal,” I mean snatching people whose only crime is working and paying their taxes in America without the proper paperwork.) This morning, Paul Krugman said the unemployment rate would probably be much higher if not for the loss of immigrants. But, he said, “the loss of foreign-born workers is probably contributing to higher inflation, over and above the effects of tariffs and now oil prices.”

Of course, the newest means of extraction is Trump’s illegal war. Iran has retaliated by taking control of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. It now has a stranglehold on the global supply of oil. Gas prices in the US are now at their highest in two and a half years. (Meanwhile, the Pentagon asked for an additional $200 billion.) If oil prices remain high for as little as two more weeks, one analyst said, a recession is sure to come. Another analyst used the D word. “If the strait remains closed, we’re not talking about a global recession – we’re talking about a depression.”

Presidents usually have little control over the economy. Trump, however, is the exception. His tax, labor and foreign policies – illegal tariffs, illegal deportations and illegal war – are the three-legged stool of extraction. He's looting America but we’re all paying for his crime.

It’s time for a word on MAGA’s support of the president’s war against Iran. Polling seems to suggest that whatever Donald Trump wants, Donald Trump gets. The latest poll from CNN found that the war is “tremendously popular” in MAGAland.

“Look at this! Nearly nine in 10, 89 percent approve of the U.S. military action in Iran. That is the MAGA GOP base,” CNN’s Harry Enten declared Tuesday morning. “Just 9 percent disapprove of it. This is tremendously popular among the Republican base.”

But I think these numbers call for a fuller context. People who identify themselves as MAGAnites are going to give their blessing to the president. Do demoralized MAGAnites identify themselves? More likely, they tell pollsters that they’re an independent voter, an ordinary conservative, a “non-MAGA Republican” or some such.

Are some MAGAnites demoralized? There is evidence to suggest as much. A progressive pollster called Navigator released a new public opinion survey today. It found that 20 percent of Trump supporters “regret” voting for him. That includes 11 percent of self-identified “MAGA Republicans.” In both cases, the most cited reasons were “broken promises” and Trump’s war against Iran.

But you can probably better see the demoralization outside the data sets. Trump’s director of counterterrorism, Joe Kent, resigned Tuesday. His reason was Trump’s broken promise to uphold the principles of America First. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” he said, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

That’s the part of his resignation letter that news reports have quoted, but the rest of it reveals what Kent really meant by broken promise. In it, he sets Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran in the context of a Jewish conspiracy against the United States. In language intended to invoke that antisemitic view, he suggests that Donald Trump didn’t really mean to choose war. Instead, globalist forces assembled to force him into choosing it.

“Early in this administration, high ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” Kent wrote. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that should you strike now there was a clear path to swift victory. This was a lie and it is the same tactic that Israel used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

At the risk of oversimplifying things, I would guess that Kent quit because he believed he was working for a puppet regime. I also think that’s what 11 percent of “MAGA Republicans” mean when they say that the president broke his promise. It’s not that he was insufficiently anti-war. It’s that he was insufficiently anti-Jew.

(Let me add here a note about the role of Israel in Trump’s war. Benjamin Netanyahu wanted it. It has provided cover for what appears to be an imperialist agenda. His forces have invaded Lebanon under the guise of fighting Hezbollah. What I am stating is a plain fact. What Kent does, however, is elevate fact to the point of conspiracy to intimate that Jews as inherently evil.)

While 11 percent signifies little right now, potential for growth is suggested by Kent’s resignation. Though the Republicans are so MAGAfied that they regularly humiliate themselves for the president’s entertainment, Joe Kent saw “political promise in turning on Trump,” according to The Bulwark’s Andrew Eggers.

It’s a political promise that can be found in the “shades of MAGA countercultural revolt against MAGA establishment,” Eggers said. This is evidenced by the array of rightwing influencers. “If you have a small right-wing following and you’re looking to make it a big right-wing following,” Eggers said, “and most especially if that following is concentrated among young rightwing people, it’s no longer the case that backing Trump to the hilt is the only move.”

A new poll found that the younger the MAGAnite, the more likely they are to oppose the war and its economic impacts. Forty-six percent of Trump voters ages 18 to 29 oppose the war, according to the Quincy Institute, while 37 percent of Trump voters ages 30 to 49 oppose it. The president’s strongest support, 86 percent, comes from supporters over 50 years of age who watch Fox.

Republicans are virtually united in preferring that Trump declare victory and get out, according to Quincy’s Trita Parsi. But the longer the war appears to them to go on in the name of Israel, not America, and the higher it pushes costs at home, the more potential there is for division. “Trump risks losing significant portions of his base if he escalates the war with ground troops and allows the war to further push up gas prices,” Parsi said.

Perhaps the biggest reason to be skeptical of polls suggesting that Trump’s war is “tremendously popular” in MAGAland is because young prominent rightwing influencers don’t believe them. Or if they do, they see profit in getting MAGAnites to doubt them . Carrie Prejean Boller, age 38, got herself kicked off the president’s Religious Liberty Commission by demanding to know if her anti-Israel views were antisemitic. (They are, mostly.) Her trolling was rewarded when her social-media following tripled.

“I do not believe [MAGA is united],” Boller told Piers Morgan Monday. Americans “know that the only reason why we are even in Iran right now is because of Israel. … I’m telling you right now MAGA is dead and we will not vote for one more politician who lies to us and says ‘oh we’re gonna drain the swamp’ and ‘we’re gonna not get involved in foreign wars.’ Trump has betrayed our country and he has betrayed maga and people are livid.”

I don’t think MAGAnites actually think about why they are demoralized. I think they latch on to reasons as they become apparent to them. NBC News’ Jonathan Allen went to central Pennsylvania to talk to Trump supporters about the war and whether their support weakened in the face of high gas prices. All but one said no, but that one was a doozy. When asked what she would say to Trump, she said: “You are a worthless pile of s---”

She voted for Trump three times! Are gas prices enough to break from him so completely? Perhaps, but I think a better explanation is that she’s hearing things from inside MAGAland. You might call them the echoes of the “anti-war and anti-Israel types,” Eggers said, who have “established a beachhead in the Republican coalition.” She can’t tell a fancy TV reporter that she’s mad about Trump breaking his promise to fight the Jewish conspiracy.

But she can tell him she’s mad about the price of gas.

I do not have a background in international relations. I do not possess any special knowledge of foreign affairs. I would struggle to explain the difference between military strategy and military tactics. Yet, apparently, I knew something our president did not.

The Iranians were never going to roll over.

They are Iranians.

Somehow that escaped Donald Trump’s attention. On Monday, he “expressed surprise at the breadth of Iran’s retaliation,” according to the Post. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. ... They fought back.’’

Of. Course. They. Did.

No one was shocked – except perhaps a titanically self-centered president surrounded by yes men. In fact, he was warned time and again, if he goes to war with Iran, that its murderous regime would become harder; that it would widen the war by attacking neighboring Gulf states; that it would retaliate by threatening the global economy; and that it would, yanno, fight to the last man.

Because they’re Iranians.

Yet time and again, Trump’s advisors “downplayed” the risks in favor of a chance for him to play a war president on American TV. They believed Iran’s leadership was going to fold like Venezuela’s did. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu sold Trump on the idea that Iranians would revolt after the regime’s leader was dead, even though his own intelligence said they would get “slaughtered.”

Because no one appears to have remembered that these are Iranians we’re talking about, the president has lost control of the war. Battered and bruised, the regime still has control of the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow gap in the Persian Gulf and with that, a stranglehold on a quarter of the world’s supply of oil.

Three tankers were attacked Wednesday, three more Thursday. (A Times analysis on Monday found that “at least 16 oil tankers, cargo ships and other commercial vessels had been attacked.”)

The president panicked over the weekend. He said “hopefully” other nations like China, Japan, South Korea, France and the UK would send warships to secure the strait. By Monday, he was threatening allies in Europe. “It will be very bad for the future of NATO” if they do not join the effort, he said. Just three days prior, he admitted to knowing that NATO’s enemy, Russia, was helping Iran. He rewarded that effort by lifting sanctions on Russian oil. Perhaps as a result, NATO allies told him you’re on your own.

Trump is now acting like he didn’t need any help anyway, a sign of desperation and perhaps that he may be getting closer to deciding to send American ground forces to secure the strait.

Indeed, a White House source told Politico: “[The Iranians] hold the cards now. They decide how long we’re involved — and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Another source said: “The terms have changed. The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

While Trump’s goal at the beginning of the war was unclear and ever-changing, it is no such thing now, as the Iranians have now determined what Trump’s goal must be: sending America’s sons and daughters to sacrifice their lives in the name of cheap gas.

“Any American troops on the ground would remain targets for Iranian attacks,” the Wall Street Journal said this morning. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – 190,000 troops strong – and its elite Quds Force specialize in asymmetric warfare and have spent decades backing insurgents throughout the Middle East, including in neighboring Iraq, where they helped militants launch deadly attacks on U.S. troops following the 2003 invasion.”

But even if American forces occupied the entire coastline of Iran along the Persian Gulf, and even if the US Navy escorted every single tanker through the Strait of Hormuz, that might not be enough to quell fear in the oil markets, because all it takes to shake the confidence of insurers is a sunk tanker here and there.

During a meeting last week, Trump demanded to know why the US can’t immediately reopen the strait. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explained, according to the Times, that all it takes to stop oil shipments is “one Iranian soldier or militia member zipping across the narrow neck of the strait in a speedboat [firing] a mobile missile right into a slow-moving supertanker.”

Though Iran's navy has mostly been destroyed, a source told Reuters, it still has “plenty of options, including fast-attack craft, mini submarines, mines and even jet skis packed with explosives.”

Such risk almost certainly means insurers won’t underwrite shipping through the strait. It’s a situation in which little Iran has Trump where it wants him. “With oil already hovering around $100 a barrel, and insurance premiums for transiting the Persian Gulf surging,” the Times said, “the image of more burning tankers would make the Iranians look more powerful than they really are.”

And even if the president were to mount a generation-defining occupation, the goal of bringing down oil prices would not be realized in the short-term. Two hundred dollar barrels of oil could be a reasonable expectation, Rogé Karma wrote in The Atlantic on Friday, “if the strait remains closed for even a month.”

Indeed, the only real way of restoring the flow of oil is by convincing insurance and shipping firms that it’s safe to go through the strait, the Wall Street Journal said, and the only way to do that is convincing the Iranians that it’s in their interest to provide insurance and shipping firms the assurances they need.

So the solution is political. As Trump believes he can do whatever he wants on his own, however, the Iranians have him over a barrel. With oil prices currently at their highest since 2023, the American middle class is going to burn up as long as he’s over it.

I was telling you the other day that the Iranians have the president’s number. They know that all they have to do to win this war is exhaust his will to fight with enough “economic pain.”

Donald Trump’s will to fight was already limited, as the point of the war was creating conditions in which an old, depleted and unpopular president looked big, tough and loved on American TV.

But I’m having second thoughts. Trump is going to want to TACO – I would guess very soon – but war against this regime isn’t like invading Venezuela. Trump might want to quit, but the Iranians are setting things up so he will have to ask for their permission.

The risk could be worse even than a forever war: The US “must consider the possibility that they will be engaged in a long-term war of attrition that will destroy the entire American economy and the world economy,” said Ali Fadavi, advisor to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' commander-in-chief, according to AFP.

What I’m thinking of is this morning’s attacks on three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow section of the Persian Gulf through which passes about 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. The Iranians had brought the shipping lane to a stand-still since the start of Trump’s war. That’s the chief reason oil prices soared Monday. (In my neighborhood in New Haven, the price at the cheap gas station spiked by about 80 cents in the last week.)

Because Iran has also been mining the waters, shipping firms have asked the US Navy for escorts. Trump hyped the possibility to ease markets, but the Times reported today that the Navy has declined all requests. Last night, Trump said US forces destroyed 10 “mine-laying vessels,” but the AP described them as “inactive.”

Trump was warned. He was told that a war with Iran could trigger oil shocks, especially at home, where the affordability issue is the primary force eating the heart out of his presidency. But the risks were “downplayed,” the Times said, in favor of a plan to “decapitate” Iran. While the military told Trump the regime would fight to the death, “other advisers remained confident that killing Iran’s senior leadership would lead to more pragmatic leaders taking over who might bring an end to the war.”

Obviously, that didn’t happen. First, because Israel, not the US, killed Ali Khamenei. Second, because his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, is more determined to prolong combat to avenge the deaths of his dad, mom, wife and son. Yesterday, a US official tried to commence ceasefire talks. Khamenei said no.

Trump thought Iran was going to be another Venezuela. In addition to the Times reporting, that’s clear from his demands. He said he wanted “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” He said he wanted a say in who is chosen to be Iran’s next leader. He called on the dissidents to rise up and overthrow the government. He suggested the US would take a stake in Iran’s oil reserves.

All these things happened, to varying degrees, in Venezuela. No one appears to have told Trump that the new enemy is Iranian or that Iranians don’t roll over. But even if someone had, it probably would not have changed his thinking. Things are going badly at home. A made-for-TV war would change the subject. And anyway, what’s one s------- country compared to another?

Iran’s agency was minimized so much in Trump’s war-planning that it was just assumed oil prices would return to normal at the end of the war. “The purposeful disruption in the oil market by the Iranian regime is short term, and necessary for the long-term gain of wiping out these terrorists and the threat they pose to America and the world,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

But, as they say, the enemy gets a vote.

This morning, Iran took responsibility for attacking three oil tankers. A drone strike also hit a port in Oman. Now, the AP said “the Iran war has blocked the Strait of Hormuz.” In response, the International Energy Agency said member countries would release a historic 400 million barrels of reserve oil. But, according to the Times, oil prices shot up anyway. Meanwhile, when asked about reopening the strait, the president told Newsweek: “It’s working out very well, and I think you are going to see that."

Trump is lying, because lies are pretty much all he and his top aides have left. Evidently, they thought this war was going to be easy-peasy. There was no plan for regime change, according to US Senator Chris Murphy, after a classified briefing. There was no plan for stopping Iran’s nuclear program. And there was no plan for the Strait of Hormuz. “They don't know how to get it safely back open,” Murphy said, “which is unforgiveable, because this part of the disaster was 100 percent foreseeable.”

The US energy secretary tried easing concerns Sunday by saying oil prices will drop once the US stops Iran’s ability to attack oil tankers. “We’re massively attriting their ability to strike with missiles and drones, and that rate of attrition will increase in the coming days,” Chris Wright told Fox. “Energy will flow soon.”

But even if that was achieved today, it would be “months before we started to see oil come down,” according to CNN. “One oil analyst said it could take one to three months after the conflict is over to start getting oil back to normal through the Strait of Hormuz.”

And that’s assuming the US has the capacity to reopen the strait and guarantee safe passage for oil tankers in the future. Some experts say that would likely take a massive ground invasion, a generation-defining investment of resources and manpower that American public opinion is united in saying is out of the question.

Iran is winning, suggested Newt Gingrich. Without a plan for the strait, Iran has Trump over a barrel. “If they can’t keep it open, this war will in fact be an American defeat before very long, because the entire world, including the American people, will react to the price of oil if the strait stays closed,” he said.

Trump finds himself in a place familiar to previous presidents mired in forever wars. He can’t leave without hurting himself. He can’t stay without hurting himself. He’s going to lie in the hope that lying frees him from responsibility. But as the saying goes, the enemy has a vote. Chickening out is no longer an option.

He can TACO when Iran says he can.

Let me see if I have this right.

The Russians are helping Iran in its war against the United States, first by providing “targeting information,” according to the Post, and second by providing “drone tactics,” according to CNN.

So the Russians are not only helping the Iranians kill American military personnel (seven have died and 140 have been injured since the start of the war). They are also helping Iran choke off the global supply of oil at the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz.

With aid from the Kremlin, the Iranians attacked three tankers Wednesday. They attacked three more today. They attacked a port in Oman. They forced ports in Iraq to close. Around a quarter of the world’s oil passes through the strait. Iran’s new supreme leader vowed to keep it shut. Oil prices are soaring.

With prices soaring, the Russians have taken in $7 billion in oil revenues in the last week alone and stand to take in more. Donald Trump is under immense pressure to increase supply. He could send in ground forces, but that would be hard. It’s easier to ease sanctions on Russian oil. The Treasury lifted them for 30 days. Expect more easing while the Strait of Hormuz is shut.

So, again, let me see if I have this right.

The Russians are not only helping Iran kill Americans, but they are also helping reduce the supply of oil, which raises the price of oil, which pressures Trump to ease oil sanctions, which enriches the Russians, which rewards them for helping Iran kill Americans.

Right?

I think USA Today’s Chris Brennan is right. On hearing credible reports of an enemy helping an enemy, “a conventional US presidential administration would respond in one of two ways.” Either “deny the reports” or “demand an end to that assistance.”

But, as Brennan suggests, the president can’t be bothered. Instead, he said Russian aid to Iran is irrelevant. “We don’t know [if it’s true],” he said, “but it’s not doing well. If they are, it’s not helping much if you take a look at what’s happening in Iran in the last week. If they’re getting information, it’s not helping them much.”

(To be clear, it’s true.)

The president also said Putin was “very impressed with what he saw,” an odd thing to say about the friend of your enemy. But the gaslightingest thing he said was that Putin “wants to be helpful.”

He wants to help himself to Ukraine and more. By helping Iran bog down Trump in another forever war, Putin is not only filling his war chest. He’s creating conditions in which Trump can’t be seen as a trusted negotiator. After all, if he can’t broker peace with Iran, he can’t broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. And if the president objects, Putin can bog him down some more.

Aside from the geopolitical considerations, however, there’s the relatively unexplored question of leadership. What does it look like to American military personnel for the commander-in-chief to act like this? Russia is helping Iran kill Americans, yet he beams with pride when recalling how “very impressed” Putin was by Trump’s war with Iran, “because no one has seen anything like it.”

Half a dozen service members were killed last Monday by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait. That same day, the Iranians attacked US military personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia. A seventh American died Sunday from the injuries he sustained.

When Trump talked to Putin Monday, did he ask if intel or drones given by Russia to Iran led to any of those seven deaths? How much responsibility does Russia carry? Did the president tell Putin there would be consequences in the future? Did he, you know, stand up to the man who’s helping kill his own people?

Another commander-in-chief would. With Trump, however, there’s a sense he’s not responsible. When troops die, he seems unmoved by their sacrifice. A reporter asked this week how many casualties he would accept in wartime. He said, in effect, that if death doesn’t bother families, why should it bother me? “I met the parents [of the war dead] and they were unbelievable people,” he said. “They said, 'finish the job, sir.' I'll leave you at that.”

The same indifference was evident at Sunday’s dignified transfer. Trump wore a white cap emblazoned with “USA” and “45-47” in gold available for purchase from the Trump Organization for $55. The image of the president as a walking advertisement during an event memorializing the honored dead was so insulting that Fox aired an old video to prevent Trump supporters from seeing it.

Over ten years, we have seen this draft-dodger use the military as a backdrop. At the same time, he’s called volunteers for service “suckers” and “losers.” He thinks soldiers maimed in combat are embarrassing. He said prisoners of war are unworthy. He insulted recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. And through that, we wondered: Why is he so deferential to Vladimir Putin?

In the absence of war, however, the insults were theoretical. His chumminess with the leader of “one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors with exquisite intelligence capabilities,” as the Post said, didn’t mean much in real life. After all, it wasn’t like agreeing with Putin got anyone killed.

Until now.

Again, it’s the president’s war, not America’s. Poll after poll after poll show a majority, sometimes a vast majority, does not want the US to be entangled in a Middle East war. There was no imminent threat. There are no clear goals. There is no exit plan. Donald Trump started a war for selfish reasons. It’s his, not ours.

Yet the president won’t be held accountable for it. Four separate investigations, including one by the Pentagon, have determined that a US bomb landed on an elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of war, killing 150 girls. Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps it was unintended. (It was near a military target). If so, a commander-in-chief of noble spirit would accept responsibility.

We don’t have one of those.

“It was done by Iran,” Trump said Sunday, incredibly.

Over the weekend, American bombs destroyed a desalination plant in Iran, according to the Post. The plant was a vital piece of civilian infrastructure in the parched desert conditions of the Persian Gulf. Yet when the president was asked about it Saturday, the Post said, he told reporters he was unaware of its destruction.

Rewind: either the commander-in-chief does not know what the military under his authority is doing or he’s bald-faced lying about what the military under his authority is doing. Both are evidence of the desire for power without responsibility for it.

Last Tuesday, Trump was asked about the worst-case scenario he had planned for in Iran. Evidently, there is no such plan, given that he guessed. “I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person.”

Three days later, the president declared that his war will end when Iran capitulates. "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site. “After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. 'MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).'”

But last night, the worst-case scenario happened, as Trump defined it. The son of Iran’s assassinated leader was chosen to be the next head of state. Mojtaba Khamenei, the Post said, is a “powerful regime insider deeply intertwined with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.” His pick “sends a strong message of defiance to the Trump administration.” NDTV said the US killed not only his dad, but also his mom, his wife and one of his kids.

So Trump killed Khamenei’s family, but expects him to give up? That, in addition to his reportedly “serious interest” in sending troops to Iran, makes you wonder if he’s right in the head. When asked for his reaction to the news of a possible ground invasion, retired General Paul Eaton, who trained combat troops in Iraq, told MS Now the first word that came to mind was “dementia.”

Whether he’s demented or not, the outcome of Donald Trump’s war is the same – someone else will be responsible for it, not him. Fox host Maria Bartiromo raised the specter of the military draft to the press secretary. “Mothers out there are worried that we’re going to have a draft, that they’re going to see their sons and daughters get involved in [the war]. What do you want to say about the president’s plans for troops on the ground?”

"It's not part of the current plan right now," Karoline Leavitt said. "But the president, again, wisely keeps his options on the table."

There hasn’t been a military draft since the end of the Vietnam war, but a ground invasion that no one wants is so personally important to this president that turning America’s sons and daughters into cannon fodder is a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

Just don’t ask for anything else, especially respect for the war dead. At the Dover Air Force Base Sunday, during the dignified transfer of six service members, Trump wore one of his caps with “USA” printed on the front and “45-47” on the side, both in gold.

The image of a president attempting to profit from the ultimate sacrifice was so insulting that Fox “accidently” aired footage from a previous dignified transfer. In its apology, however, Fox did not show the correct footage, nor did it describe what happened.

The war dead may have been killed thanks to Russian aid to Iran, but the president won’t take responsibility for that either.

The AP reported Friday that Russia has give Iran intelligence to help “strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region.” When a Fox reporter asked about it, Trump snapped back: “What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time.”

(On the same day that the AP reported on Russia’s abetting of Iran, the US Treasury said it might lift sanctions on Russian oil.)

A president who won’t give anything, not even respect, still expects the rest of us to. “Oil prices have crossed into triple digits for the first time since 2022,” Axios reported Sunday, “a stark sign of how the Iran war is throttling global supplies and raising consumer costs.” Politico said experts are “predicting we may see $4 and perhaps $5-a-gallon gas prices within weeks. And this in a country where the cost of living is already the hottest political issue in a midterm year” (bolded stress in the original).

Though Trump promised to bring down costs and put America First, spiking costs with $5-a-gallon gas is apparently the price for stability in … some place that’s not America, said Florida Congressman Carlos Gimenez: “You gotta pay the price. If [the war] takes four weeks, so be it. If it takes a bit longer, so be it.”

Trump is spending tens of billions in the name of the American people while driving up the cost of living for everyone with an illegal war, as well as illegal tariffs, and cutting off the safety net and gutting health care. But it’s all going to be worth it, right?

Hardly. Even before Mojtaba Khamenei was installed to replace his murderous dad, the Iranians had Trump’s number. They know they can use “economic pain” to exhaust his political will, which was already in short supply, as the point of the war was never defense but creating conditions in which an old, depleted and unpopular president looks big, tough and loved on American TV.

And just like that, the president seems ready to TACO.

Amid news of soaring oil prices, Trump told CBS News today that “the war is very complete, pretty much.” He said “they have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force,” which, even if true, is far short of his previous demand for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Iran predicted this would happen. Then it did.

What has all the sacrifice been for? Iran has a new leader who’s more murderous than the last one. It is more motivated than ever to acquire nuclear weapons. Its pro-democracy movement has been crushed. Experts worry Tehran will activate “sleeper cells” in the US. And war, not peace, has spread across the region. (Not to mention Iran’s incentive to choke off the global supply of oil at the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf whenever it wants to.)

Iran is winning the war.

Because it’s Trump’s, not America’s.

The list of reasons for the president’s illegal and unjustified war against Iran keeps growing. First, it was because Iran had nuclear weapons. (It didn’t.) Then it was because the Iranian people longed for democracy and human rights. Then it was because Iran is a leader in state-sponsored terrorism. Now it’s because of America’s obligation as “a free people” to liberate the oppressed.

But Donald Trump doesn’t mean a word of what he says about his reasons for attacking Iran without the consent of the Congress, because he is a man who never means a word he says. He will say virtually anything to achieve his objectives, no matter how petty or consequential those objectives may be, and if achieving them requires him to contradict previous statements, so be it.

In 2011, Trump famously accused President Barack Obama, who was struggling in the polls, of planning to “start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective so the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.” In saying this, he appeared to believe that a president who starts a war to protect power is a cheat and a criminal.

He did not mean a word of it, unless he meant that it’s bad when a Democratic president does it but okie-dokie when he does. Either way, that allegation was levied in bad faith in order to deceive – to make Americans believe, in 2011, that Trump cared about things like principles and morality when principles and morality have always been mere tools for achieving his goals.

That Trump does not believe anything he says is illustrated moreover by the fact that he’s been calling individual reporters to determine which war rationales sound best in persuading a skeptical public. One in four say they support war with Iran, Reuters said today. According to an AP poll released last week, just 27 percent trust him to make good choices when it comes to using military force. Meanwhile, a CNN poll released last week found a stunning 68 percent believe he has the wrong priorities.

In that context, The Economist’s Gregg Carlstrom noticed Trump has been workshopping goals and rationales with reporters. To the Post, he said the goal is "freedom for the people.” He told Axios he can get Iran to make a deal “in two or three days.” He told the Times a deal might take "four to five weeks.” (He even suggested that he has “three very good choices" as to who would control Iran.) However, he told ABC News, actually nevermind.

“He doesn't sound convinced by any of it,” Gregg Carlstrom wrote on Twitter today. “He's throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he ‘solved’ a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there's no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”

The president does not sound convinced of his own words, because, again, he does not believe in his own words. He didn’t mean it when he said he would lower the cost of living. He didn’t mean it when he said he would bring “the Epstein class” to justice. He didn’t mean it when he said only “bad immigrants” would be deported. And now, after a decade of presenting himself as a peace-seeking isolationist who serves America’s needs first, he’s going to war, because he never meant a word.

Everything he is saying right now has one goal, which is creating conditions in which the unpopular president looks big and tough on TV for the purpose of gaining support in advance of this year’s midterms. You could say Trump is doing exactly what he accused Obama of doing. But you also say he’s doing what Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu is currently doing: waging a forever war in order to stay in power forever. Trump has been bragging for months about ending “eight wars.” (He said as much during the State of the Union address.) He believed being seen as a peace-making president would rally the base. That’s not working, so he now believes victory lies in the path of war-making. That this is a diametric reversal of a decade of isolationist rhetoric is irrelevant to him, because everything he said was intended in bad faith.

In the absence of an actual emergency, most Americans aren’t buying the rationale for war. Today, a new CNN found that nearly 60 percent disapprove. That’s before body bags start coming home. How high will disapproval go after the press corps focuses on the war dead? (Pete Hegseth said today he has not ruled out a ground invasion. Trump said today that the war could last four to five weeks.) And that poll was taken in the context of Trump’s heelturn. Every report I have read about Trump’s war has noted how it stands in stark contrast with his previous disdain for “forever wars” – a disdain now revealed to be totally fake.

The Democrats in the Congress are concentrating their energy on a bipartisan war-powers resolution. The goal is to reclaim constitutional authority from an executive who is abusing his. The president has to ask for permission to go to war, and many of the Democrats seem certain that the answer is going to be no.

That’s good, but the president’s betrayal of his stated principles in pursuit of a war to maintain his power presents a bigger opportunity – to dismantle what remains of the public’s trust and, most specifically, to accelerate the demoralization of his base. Maga voters are almost certainly not going to vote for a Democrat, but the Democrats can give reasons to stay home.

I’ll end by quoting Democrat Eric Swallwell, the California congressman: “This guy has lied to the American people about everything he promised he would do. … He said he would lower prices on day one. Instead, he put in his idiotic tariff policy that has raised Price. He said that he would get rid of war and now we are … a year into the administration. We have two new wars on the map in Venezuela and Iran. He has done the exact opposite this entire presidency of what he told he was going to do.”

The president lied and lied. He lied so much he appears to think he’s going to scam his way to victory in November. Last week's State of the Union was a preview of what's to come.

Above and below each of Donald Trump's lies was a set of deep-seated beliefs. He doesn’t need the Congress. He doesn’t need the people. He doesn’t need the “disloyal.” He doesn’t need the truth. He believes he can create reality. He believes everyone’s going to believe it.

However, you might not know any of that from reading this morning's headlines. The Associated Press called his lies “takeaways.” NPR called them “familiar notes.” Worst of all, an email alert I received from USA Today called the vast scale of deceit “fighting words.”

A deeper read of followup coverage shows the press corps’ meaning. The president said he was going to use the speech to “sell the public on the economy and unveil new measures meant to lower costs,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic said it had “the potential to put his presidency on more stable ground — if he doesn’t get in his own way.”

Turns out, however, the speech was just more of the same scam.

“Trump has spent the last year boasting of his accomplishments while mocking the record of his predecessor, Joe Biden,” the AP reported today. “But much of this bluster has been based on misinformation, which he again fell back on during his State of the Union address.”

For instance:

"When I last spoke in this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis, with a stagnant economy." No. “Incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” Nope. Tariffs are “saving our country, the kind of money we’re taking in.” Nuh-uh.

One falsehood revealed true intent. Tariffs are part of a scheme by moneyed elites to push the burden of taxation downward so that you, me and everyone we know pay more for a civilized country than they do. The ideal is eliminating the income tax, which burdens moneyed elites most, replacing it with a sales tax, like a tariff, which burdens everyone else.

But success would depend on a majority of the people who would be fully burdened by it not to fully understand it. If they did, it would fail. So, I guess, whoops: “I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” the president said.

“The people that I love,” of course, are the moneyed elite.

Trump is lying so hard about foreigners paying for his tariff scheme, because he wants to prevent the truth from being broadly understood. It's the biggest tax increase in over 30 years, according to multiple studies. Importers pony up the extra expense, but charge more to recoup it. The Federal Reserve said US consumers paid over 90 percent of the added cost.

What’s more is this historic tax increase was illegal the whole time. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Congress, and only the Congress, has the tax power. It’s being said Trump accepts the court's judgment, but I don’t know how that can be. He responded with a new round of tariffs (under a new authority) that is, according to Judd Legum, just as illegal.

So not only did Trump scam us with an illegal tax, and not only are corporations that passed on the cost to us going to be refunded, an act the Treasury secretary has already called “ultimate corporate welfare,” he’s also finding new ways of scamming us – at least until the Supreme Court catches up with to him a year from now to strike down his new illegal tax.

By then, of course, it will be too late.

A president who intended to turn the economy around with policies that benefit the majority of people would take into account polling saying that a majority of people disprove. A Fox News poll taken before the high court’s ruling found 63 percent believe Trump has gone too far on tariffs. That’s in addition to 65 percent who disapprove of his handling of inflation.

That poll and others like it amount to what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called "an extinction-level event." "He’s like negative 40-plus with independents," Jeffries said before last week's speech. "Latino voters are leaving him. Young voters are leaving him. Working-class white voters are leaving him. Independents have abandoned him a long time ago. Any normal person would realize we better change course because this is not working."

That the president’s current course is not working is beside the point, however, given that economic policies benefiting the majority were never the goal. The real objective has always been enacting economic policies that benefit a tiny minority – “the people that I love” – while scamming everyone else into believing Donald Trump cares enough to solve their problems.

Last week's speech was marketed as a chance for Trump to reset. But there’s nothing to reset. If the Republicans hope to avoid slaughter, they'll have to scam even harder.

“He needs all four years to fix the mess,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson in a Fox interview after the State of the Union. “If we lost the midterms – heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House – it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect."

“We gotta keep this going,” he said, meaning the scam.

Last week's speech was a preview of what’s of the come.

The American people were under no imminent threat from Iran. Its government does not have nuclear weapons. It was no more threatening to Israel or any other US ally than it normally is. The decision this morning to attack Tehran, the capital, has nothing to do with “freedom for Iran,” as Donald Trump told the Post. He’s not going to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” Why? Because that’s not the point.

The point is creating a made-for-TV war that makes Trump look like a big, tough war president. He’s doing this for transparently obvious reasons: things are going badly, very badly, for him at home. Freedoms are being violated. The middle class is being immiserated. There’s a general sense that the rich and powerful – the Epstein class – can act with impunity while everyone else pays the price. If Trump doesn’t change the subject, his presidency, and perhaps more than his presidency, will cease to be as it is once the Congress is turned over to the Democrats.

Trump believes Americans will rally around the presidency in a time of war, thus boosting his poll numbers among people who only pay attention to the news if there’s a war going on. This is not an Israel-Iran war. This is not a US-Iran war. Those titles give this moment too much dignity. This is little more than a political stunt, with the real consequences being murdered Iranians.

As such, it has to be as brief as it is spectacular to watch on Fox. There can’t be any US casualties, anyway not so many that it looks bad on video screens. He is making titanic declarations to suggest that he has an indomitable will to achieve objectives at any cost. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Post this morning. “I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” But again, that’s just part of the performance.

As soon as something goes sideways, and it will go sideways given enough time, Donald Trump will chicken out. That’s why he will end it quickly – to prevent what is so far a carefully managed political stunt from blowing up in his face. He will accept any convenient reason to declare victory over Iran, even if victory falls short of “a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.”

I will defer to authorities on Middle East politics, but from where I’m standing, Trump today ended the democratic spirit that was rising up from the Iranian people. Iran’s government has been crushing dissent for months. Trump is acting like he’s enabling regime change, as if he were the Great Liberator. In reality, he’s justified more repression by an already repressive government. More than that, he’s undermining dissidents. Who’s going to be seen as American allies after the US bombed a girls school?

Indeed, Iran’s government benefits twice. Not only can it justify more, and more violent, crackdowns on individual liberty in the name of national security, it can also defeat “the Great Satan” with a lucky punch. Again, this is a made-for-TV war. Trump does not have the will to do what it takes to “liberate” Iran. That would require a generation-defining occupation of the kind that George W Bush attempted in Iraq in the 2000s. All Iran has to do is bloody Trump’s nose – bomb a base, sink a ship, humiliate the titan so that his titanic declarations seem farcical. They can declare victory, then go back to repressing their own people.

Because the point of all this is looking good on TV, Trump has overlooked the fact that he’s not in complete control. As someone wiser than me once said, the enemy gets a vote, too. Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly pretending to act like an ally, as if his top priority is Israel’s and America’s safety and security. In reality, what he needs is a continual emergency to stay in power to prevent him from being prosecuted and imprisoned for life. As such, he’s happy to provide cover to Trump’s stunt, as attacking Iran seems more justifiable in America if seen as defending Israel. But Netanyahu’s credibility in America is now deeply strained, to put it mildly, by the fact that he murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians. He’ll be all right if the Democrats in the Congress play along with him and Trump. What happens if they don’t?

Whether the Democrats do play along will be determined by how far they are willing to go in accepting Trump’s lies – if they accept that Iran posed such a threat to America and Israel, by way of possessing nuclear weapons, that Trump and Netanyahu were justified in triggering a conflict that could engulf the world. There is no reason the Democrats should accept those lies, given that Trump already said Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated.” If the Democrats decide against playing along, we might expect them to lump the president’s new illegal war with all other high crimes committed against the Constitution and the American people, so that a made-for-TV war intended to boost his standing with voters before the midterms becomes just another liability.

Not only for him but for Netanyahu, too. You could argue that but for the faith of the Democrats, Netanyahu would be in jail. His war crimes have put a wedge between the Democrats and the biggest pro-Israel lobby. That wedge could become permanent, as Democratic elites slowly come around to accepting the idea that Joe Biden’s position on Gaza cost Kamala Harris precious votes.

Moreover, Gallup found for the first time in 25 years that more Americans, not just Democrats, sympathize with the Palestinians more than they sympathize with the Israelis. Whatever the American consensus on Israel used to be, it clearly no longer is. The more Netanyahu exploits Trump’s vanity to stay out of jail, the wider that gap will get, to Netanyahu’s detriment.

Until yesterday, it wasn’t clear to me why Savannah Guthrie’s mom was still missing nearly a month after her disappearance. Then came images Sunday of the FBI director, Kash Patel, partying with members of the US Olympic hockey team after they won the gold medal.

Then it all started to make sense.

Why wouldn’t Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping remain unsolved given the country’s leading lawman doesn’t take the law seriously? He thinks the FBI gives him access to things other people can’t, as if law and order were an exclusive membership card to an elite club.

Meanwhile, real people suffer.

For all we know, Nancy Guthrie could be dead.

If you haven’t heard, Kash Patel took a taxpayer-funded jet to Italy to watch the men’s hockey final. His office said he was checking on security. His people accused reporters of lying when they reported the news. Their boss, with images of his partying, exposed their lies.

Sunday’s episode was only one instance of a larger pattern of lawlessness that's getting so big that the Times noted that Patel has “shown little willingness to curb or even conceal his jet-setting." He "has offered comparable explanations" (ie, lies) "to provide SWAT team protection for his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, a country singer and rightwing activist, as well as for his heavy use of federal resources for travel that has at times appeared to blur professional lines.”

The Times said that "over the summer, he flew on a government jet from the Washington area to Inverness, Scotland, for a getaway at the exclusive golf resort, the Carnegie Club, with friends ... He has also taken flights, at taxpayer expense, to a private hunting ranch in Texas and to a wrestling match in State College, Pa., to watch a performance by Ms. Wilkins.

The Times and others say Patel’s bad behavior comes in spite of “multiple, fast-developing crises.” These include Americans in Mexico being told to shelter in place after a drug cartel leader was killed by the military. Closer to home, police killed a Florida man who tried to enter Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and a gas can. Scott MacFarlane added more context:

The FBI is being pushed by Epstein survivors to do more to investigate some of the people … that have come out in the released batch of Epstein files, which show the circle that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein as he prayed on girls and young women. … All these things, not to mention crime nationwide, opioid crisis, gun crimes, child pornography, drug running, gun running, are happening as the FBI director is ... partying with his buddies.

But I think it’s the other way around. It’s not that Patel’s lawlessness is happening in light of these crimes. They are happening in light of his lawlessness. Why care about the law, or criminal consequences, when the country’s leading lawman shows so much contempt for it?

The Times reported that Patel was cheering Team USA when he tweeted that the FBI would dedicate “all necessary resources” to investigating the Mar-a-Lago incident. The implication is that he’s falling down on the job, as “all necessary resources” clearly didn’t include him.

But consider the message he's sending – that law enforcement is just empty talk. That's more consequential than falling down on the job. With his actions, Patel is saying that as long as you’re hooked up to the right people, you can do all the criming you want. Even if you’re not hooked up, just wait. When the cops are away, the criminals can come out to play.

This message was deepened by Patel’s (almost certainly fictional) claim that he was invited by the men’s hockey team to celebrate their victory with them. A different FBI director would have refused such an invitation out of concern that accepting it would not only compromise the bureau’s standing with the American people but also appear to encourage lawlessness. But public trust means little to a man who acts like he will never face public accountability.

Lawlessness isn’t harmless.

An FBI director who properly feared public accountability would never have let an Arizona sheriff investigate Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance without the FBI’s aid. He or she would have given Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos a choice: save yourself the humiliation of failure by accepting that the FBI is “the premier agency to deal with kidnappings,” as one expert described the bureau, or I will open my own investigation and guarantee your humiliation.

Instead, the FBI joined the investigation many days after Guthrie went missing, a debilitating loss of time, critics told the New York Post, that allowed for serious errors – for instance, surrendering the crime scene too soon, “with everyone from reporters to true-crime sleuths able to walk right up to Guthrie’s front door with no security or crime scene tape.”

As things stand, Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance is now approaching a month in duration. Her family seems increasingly desperate. Savannah Guthrie herself is forced to make public pleas to her mom’s kidnappers that yield no results. Nanos and Patel are both humiliated, but only Nanos, who faces future reelection as a sheriff, will be held accountable. Meanwhile, Patel jet-sets on the taxpayer dime, hastening the decline of public faith in law enforcement.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s tariff scheme, because the power of taxation goes to the Congress, not the president. “The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.

The news is being framed as a loss. “The 6-3 ruling is a major blow to the president’s signature economic policy,” NPR said. It “represents a stinging political setback,” the Post said. “The first major piece of President Trump’s broad agenda” has been upended, the AP said.

In truth, the court probably saved Trump from himself.

Hours before the court’s ruling came news of the US economy slowing down to a degree much greater than economists expected, because consumers pulled back so sharply. They did so, of course, because Trump’s tariffs scheme amounted to the biggest tax increase of the last three decades, according to the Tax Foundation. (JP Morgan Chase, in an assessment published last April, said it’s the biggest since 1968.)

The Times said the government collected nearly $290 billion in custom duties last year, triple what was collected the year before. Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a report saying more than 90 percent of that came out of the pockets of American consumers. (This quarter was shaping up to be worse than the last, as consumer confidence “collapsed” last month to its lowest level since 2014.)

So the court probably stopped Trump from burning up the rest of the American middle class, and sparking a broad-based backlash against him in this year’s midterms, threatening to take his party down with him. (Even people who do not pay attention to politics, indeed, who know almost nothing, rated his handling of prices at -40 percent.)

Still, in saving Trump from himself, the court made something clear to Americans that may not have been clear before this morning’s ruling – tariffs are taxes. Not only that, thanks to the court, everyone now knows the biggest tax hike since the Clinton administration was illegal.

So you could say the court saved Trump, but you could also say it gave his enemies strong grounds for accusing him of pulling off the biggest heist of the 21st century, and, because of the massive scale of the burglary, the economy came to a crawl. Again, we’re talking about nearly $290 billion, almost all of it paid for by you, me and everyone we know. (I’m using that figure. Others estimate upwards of $1 trillion.)

Even Brett Kavanaugh suggested, though without meaning to, that there’s been a robbery and victims are entitled to just compensation. In his dissent, the associate justice said that Trump’s tariff scheme is too complicated to unwind, with the primary complication being “refunds.”

“The court’s decision is likely to generate other serious practical consequences in the near term,” Kavanaugh wrote. “One issue will be refunds. Refunds of billions of dollars would have significant consequences for the US treasury. The court says nothing today about whether and if so how, the government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers, but that process is likely to be a ‘mess,’ as was acknowledged at oral arguments.”

Of course, Kavanaugh is talking about refunds to importers, which deepens the injustice of it all. They didn’t ultimately pay! We did!

I think Democratic leaders should make a deal with voters: Give us the Congress in November and we’ll pass a law forcing Trump to give back the money he stole from you. Moreover, I think the Democrats should dare their GOP counterparts to codify Trump’s tariffs and risk the allegation, entirely justified, that not only did the president pick the people’s pocket but his party now wants to make pickpocketing legal.

The Republicans probably won’t have to go that far given that Justice Kavanaugh, in his dissent, actually suggested ways for the president to get around today’s ruling, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s what Trump is going to do. In today’s press conference, during which he said he was “absolutely ashamed” of the high court, Trump announced a new set of global tariffs under a different law that restricts levies to 150 days.

It’s often said Trump doesn’t understand how tariffs work, but he does. He gets what they really are: leverage against rich people, corporations and countries he’s seeking to extort. It was reported today that he was angry with the court, but it wasn’t because it “set back his agenda.” It was because it took away his most powerful tool for seeking bribes.

The president’s criminal intent snapped into focus during the presser, though it was so subtle that it went mostly unnoticed. A reporter asked why Trump didn’t work with the Congress to establish import taxes, rather than pursuing another round of tariffs that will end up being challenged in court again. Trump’s reply: “Because I don’t have to.”

“I have the right to do tariffs,” he said. “I’ve always had that right to do tariffs. It’s all been approved by Congress. There’s no reason to do it.”

Rewind: The Supreme Court just said he can’t do tariffs unilaterally, that “the Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” and that actions to the contrary are illegal. (Plus: Congress has not, and almost certainly will not, approve new taxes.)

Even though the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariffs are illegal, the criminal intent behind them hasn’t changed. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, in so many words, that the theft of the American people will continue through 2026. As for the money already stolen from us, he said: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see it.”

The president is burning up the American middle class with the largest tax increase since the early 1990s, which itself is snowballing the price of everything from coffee to clothes to carpets to car parts.

Yet this isn’t a major, ongoing, attention-grabbing story.

To be sure, there’s plenty of reporting about Donald Trump’s approval ratings. He’s underwater on every issue you can think of, including immigration. His so-called deportation crackdown has lost support, even among men. Reuters said today that only 41 percent approve.

But even that reporting carries an undercurrent of uncertainty, as if the Washington press corps can’t figure out the cause of what is becoming a broadbased backlash against the president’s tariffs. In the absence of clarity, there are abstract questions, especially about the unknowable future, ie, how will "affordability issues” impact the midterm elections?

Meanwhile, the American middle class is practically screaming for attention in hopes that someone somewhere does something now.

In January, consumer confidence “collapsed” to its lowest level since 2014, the AP reported. That same month job losses piled up to their highest level since 2009, according to an independent report. (Tariffs are driving job loss and slowing hiring, CNBC reported.) Meanwhile, health care costs keep going up, as do housing and energy costs.

The news media is not making a major story out of the fact that Trump is burning up the middle class because it’s the middle class that’s getting burned up.

Last week, G Elliott Morris, the data journalist who publishes Strength in Numbers, found that among people who don’t pay attention to politics (they don’t know which party controls the Congress), the president’s approval on the handling of prices is negative 40 percent.

Trump’s polling is getting so bad some pollsters are doubting whether he has a floor of support at all. On Monday, after the new Q Poll showed Trump’s net approval with independent voters is at -27 percent, CNN’s Harry Enten asked: “Where is the floor for Donald Trump? I’m not sure he has a floor, because if there is one, Donald Trump, at least in term No. 2, has just fallen through it to another low level.”

All of this, in one way or another, is driven by Trump’s tariffs.

You would think that a president who is immiserating middle-class Americans with the biggest tax increase in over three decades would get the attention of a press corps that can otherwise be trusted to chase down every detail of every program that affects tax-payers.

As things stand, however, we can reasonably conclude that, to the owners of the county’s most lucrative media properties, taxes are less important than the question of who’s paying for them. They are not making a major story out of the fact that Trump is burning up the middle class because it’s the middle class that’s getting burned up.

Remember, they knew. Tariffs are taxes we pay for products brought into the US. It was never going to be foreign countries. It was always going to be us. But the press corps, in deference to Trump’s lies about what they really are, made it sound like it was a question of maybe.

Well, there’s no more maybe.

The Federal Reserve of New York said Friday that US consumers are paying nearly all the cost of tariffs (90 percent). A previous report by the Tax Foundation said average households are paying the equivalent of $1,000 in taxes. (That’s expected to climb to $1,300 this year.)

All that pain might have been a honeymoon. According to the Wall Street Journal, importers that had been absorbing costs are no longer going to. “After holding the line on prices for several months, companies — big and small — have begun a new round of increases, in some cases by high-single-digit percentage points,” the Journal said.

And more pain is on the horizon. The White House wants to impose a new tariff, or “cargo tax,” on imports as part of a scheme to revitalize domestic shipping, according to Roll Call. “To help fund shipyard improvements, the administration wants to impose a new fee on all foreign-built commercial vessels bringing merchandise into US ports.”

In its assessment, the Tax Foundation said in no uncertain terms that Trump’s tariffs amount to the biggest tax increase in 33 years, and what I was to know is: why don’t major media outlets say it just like that?

I don’t mean now. I mean then – back when saying it just like that would have mattered. If voters understood, truly understood, that he wanted to impose a tax hike bigger than any since 1993, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, would voters have made the same decision?

Kamala Harris tried to warn us. She said Trump’s tariffs were “a sales tax on the American people.” But she wasn’t taken seriously, not as seriously as Trump would have been had their roles been reversed – if Harris, not Trump, had proposed a historic tax increase that keeps increasing. In that case, there would have been saturation coverage about the peril of raising taxes in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

Why didn’t that happen to Trump?

I think part of the reason is media stereotypes. The GOP, not the Democrats, is seen as the anti-tax party. In addition to Trump’s lies, what prevents reporters from building a narrative about the largest tax increase since the late 20th century is a kind of cognitive dissonance. The story can’t be that big since it’s the anti-tax party that’s doing it.

But I also think part of the reason is media interest. Whenever Democrats talk about raising taxes, they mean raising them on rich individuals and corporations, asking them to pay their fair share for everyone’s benefit. Such proposals always get wall-to-wall coverage, because who’s getting taxed is rich individuals who own corporations.

Trump’s tariffs are different. They are part of the elite goal of making the US tax code more regressive, so that less of the responsibility for a civilized country falls on those who can afford to pay more. Though they are known as the anti-tax party, the Republicans don’t mind taxes, as long as it’s you, me and everyone we know who’s paying for them.

It’s because Trump’s tariffs are in line with this larger, and largely unknown, effort by elites that headlines about them rarely featured their real and politically-charged name: tax. And instead of saying definitively what they are, and explaining definitely what their impact would be on middle-class Americans already heaving under the weight of an affordability crisis, the news media turned a fact into a question.

The aligned interests of the Republicans and the billionaire owners of news media corporations is also why, no matter how loudly or how strenuously Democrats accuse Trump of implementing “the largest peacetime tax hike in US history,” the allegation rarely breaks through.

Basically, if it’s a tax on elites, elites make it sound like a tax on you. If it’s a tax on you, they make you wonder if it’s a tax at all. When you understand this double standard, you can see how the news media actually created conditions during the 2024 election in which some middle-class Americans unknowingly voted for their own immiseration.

And now they’re mad.

On Tuesday, Larry Kudlow, the Fox personality and former Trump advisor, was on the TV.

You will be shocked to learn he lied.

“I vote in the state of Connecticut. You don’t need a photo ID. You could vote if you just show them a credit card or a debit card, which anybody can get their hands on. I think it’s a scam."

The context was “election integrity” and voter-ID laws. At the time, the House was debating a bill that would nationalize elections to an alarming degree. (The so-called SAVE America Act passed the following day.) Kudlow’s “commentary” primed Donald Trump to respond.

“Connecticut is an extremely corrupt voting place,” he said. “That's why a guy like [Richard] Blumenthal can keep getting elected. He admitted he cheated on the war. I went to Vietnam for a couple of days and I spent two more days than he did there. He was never there."

All but one thing above, which I will get to, is a lie.

I also live in Connecticut. I vote in Connecticut. You cannot walk into a polling station, present a credit card and vote. I don’t know if that would be illegal. I do know it would fail.

You are permitted to vote without photo-ID, but the documents you are required to produce are the same ones you are required to produce to get a Connecticut drivers license.

In other words, proof of residency.

According to today’s New Haven Register, those documents include:

a utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck or government document that shows their name and address; a Social Security card; or any form of identification that shows the voter’s name and address, name and signature, or name and photograph.”

But Connecticut’s election laws don’t stop there.

Even if you have photo-ID, or produce the same documents required to get photo-ID, you still have to go through an additional process. Volunteer poll workers find your name and address on a list of voters. That list is maintained by Republican and Democratic registrars. It is created via voter registration, a process that happens in advance of Election Day.

So there are at least two stages, registration and verification.

Here’s Connecticut’s top elections official with the rest of the details:

“Every community has both a Republican and a Democrat responsible for running elections. We use paper ballots. Our voting equipment is not connected to the internet. We conduct rigorous preelection testing and post-election audits. And when an issue is identified, it is investigated and addressed through law and not rhetoric."

Here's an example of “when an issue is identified”: In 2023, the state's media was abuzz with news of an attempt to stuff mail-in vote boxes in favor of Bridgeport’s Democratic mayor, Joe Ganim. The perpetrators, all Democrats, were found, prosecuted and convicted. The state’s legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, tightened rules to prevent future abuse.

It’s safe to presume that Larry Kudlow knows the same things I know given that we both live and vote in the state of Connecticut. I think it’s therefore reasonable to conclude not only that he’s lying, but that he knows he’s lying. And I think it's important to say that plainly.

A lot of time is put into fact-checking in a valiant effort to defend the truth, but the lies themselves are worth paying attention to, because without them, the true position of the GOP would be indefensible. Achieving their goals would be impossible without deceit.

The liars know election fraud is rare. States and localities have multi-stage verification processes. They know that rarity is due to state laws holding criminals accountable. And liars know Americans prefer tradition. We prefer states and localities be in charge of elections.

What do the liars really want?

To stop the Democrats from winning.

To do that, the president and his allies need to put in place a system with rules that suppress voters who favor Democrats. To do that, they need to take away voting authority from localities and states. That’s the point of the SAVE America Act. (It is also the point of a lawsuit against Connecticut and other blue states to force them to turn over voter rolls.) If successful, the effort would give the GOP a means of voiding Democratic victories.

That’s what they want, but they can’t say that. So they lie.

They ask “questions” about “election integrity,” as if manifesting the will of the American people were their highest value. They talk about “election security” as if threats by Russian or Chinese aggressors were of actual concern. They do this not to raise awareness of problems, or to search for good-faith solutions, but to sabotage trust in free and fair elections.

And they smear.

That brings me to Richard Blumenthal.

Before he ran for the Senate in 2010, Blumenthal was Connecticut’s attorney general for 20 years. He was popular. Everyone knew running for the Senate was a foregone conclusion.

In the run up to Election Day that year, the Times ran a story documenting a few times when Blumenthal seemed to suggest he served “in” Vietnam. He didn’t. He served stateside for six years in the US Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam War. But most Nutmeggers, as we sometimes call ourselves, were already familiar with his biography. It was widely understood what Dick Blumenthal meant to say. The allegations of “stolen valor” fell flat and he won.

Donald Trump often comes back to this moment when Blumenthal is in the headlines criticizing him. This time, however, the president didn’t just smear Blumenthal. He smeared the whole state. After all, only an “extremely corrupt voting place” like Connecticut would keep electing a senator who “admitted he cheated on the war. … He was never there."

That’s the only true thing Donald Trump said: Blumenthal wasn’t there. Otherwise, his every word was a lie designed to project onto enemies his own criminal intent in the belief they will chose to protect themselves and the truth rather than go on the offensive against him.

Liars expect us to defend the truth.

They don’t expect us to attack them for lying.

From where I was sitting Wednesday, it looked like the attorney general pretty much invited the United States Congress to impeach her. Here’s how the New York Daily News put it, summarizing the AP’s coverage of her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee:

Attorney General Pam Bondi launched into a passionate defense of President Donald Trump Wednesday as she tried to turn the page from relentless criticism of the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, repeatedly shouting at Democrats during a combative hearing in which she postured herself as the Republican president’s chief protector.

I put that last bit in italics not only to emphasize the key fact of the news, but also to suggest it’s all the reason you need to impeach.

The attorney general is the top law enforcement officer of the United States. The attorney general is not the president’s defense counsel. Anything short of that standard is dereliction of duty and betrayal of the oath, high crimes demanding she be removed from office.

I mean, ranking member Jamie Raskin’s opening statement could be used later in drawing up articles of impeachment against Bondi. The Maryland congressman enumerated all the ways the attorney general “ignored the law” passed by the Congress to release the Epstein files.

Watching clip after clip, I was surprised to see Bondi didn’t bother hiding it. In behavior unbecoming of a high officer, she screamed, she pouted, and she insulted the Democrats, all without apparent concern that doing so revealed the intent behind her actions – that Donald Trump’s interests are her interests, those of the people be damned.

Immediately, Bondi’s theatrics raised more questions than answers, according to New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

“She was screaming and thrashing, and I think that’s because she knows that she is implicated in a massive coverup to protect a powerful ring of pedophiles through the redaction of the names of perpetrators, the holding of 3 million files, the unexplained moving of Ghislaine Maxwell into a new cushy facility – all of these things are what she personally oversaw. That’s before even digging into whatever questions may arise from her history in Florida, and I think that her thrashing and her very erratic performance today pointed to the fact that there are real questions that point to the DOJ under her leadership specifically.”

Clearly, her performance was strategic. It was part of her goal of deflecting attention away from the president and the fact that his name appears more than a million times in files related to Jeffrey Epstein that were released by the Department of Justice, according to Raskin.

She beclowned herself and perhaps it worked. Most headlines I have seen about her testimony are a variation of the Daily News’: “Bondi shouts down Democrats in hearing on Epstein files release delays.”

At one point, the attorney general said instead of criticizing Trump, we should be glorifying him, as the Dow Jones Industrial broke a new record this week. She spoke as if she were a fan girl. “They said it couldn’t be done in four years, yet President Trump has done it in one!”

At another, instead of answering Jerry Nadler’s question about how many of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators she has indicted, she all but knocked the pitcher over to avoid saying the embarrassing truth: none.

Bondi even allowed herself to be seen thumbing through “flash cards with individualized insults,” Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie said. “But she couldn’t memorize them, so you can see her shuffle through them to find the flash-cards-insult that matches the member.”

Bondi humiliated herself for Trump’s sake, but we shouldn’t just move on. We should dwell on that choice. As Raskin said, in response to her petulance, Bondi was trying to “filibuster” the Congress in order to prevent it from manifesting its will, in this case, getting answers from the attorney general about delays in releasing the Epstein files.

That is contempt. Contempt of Congress is a crime. When you show contempt for Congress to the Congress – to the actual faces of elected members while under oath – the Congress cannot overlook it without expecting such crimes to continue. Nip it in the bud. Impeach Bondi.

It’s important to say that plainly. Too often, liberals get bogged down in debates over intent. Why did Bondi play the fool? Ron Filipkowski, at Meidasnews.com, said her “reprehensible performance was to please an audience of one who expects reprehensible performances.”

I have no doubt that’s true, but I also think the reasons are secondary to the behavior itself. It doesn’t really matter that her clown act was intended to protect Donald Trump. More important is holding her accountable so future officials know clown acts come with a price.

Impeachment isn’t possible right now. The Democrats do not have the numbers. Even if they did, there’s no guarantee her indictment by a House majority would lead to conviction by two-thirds of the Senate.

But that, too, is beside the point. Fortunately, some Democrats appear to understand the point is saying she’s unfit, right now, to build momentum toward retaking the House, and once achieved, using that majority power to advance the cause of justice. As Raskin said:

“If [the Democrats] had the power, we would subpoena [Bondi], and we would require her to answer our questions.” Raskin went on to say:

“So that is the importance of who’s going to be in control in Congress after the 2026 elections because we would like the subpoena power, so we don’t see this kind of phenomenal disrespect of Congress.”

The way I see it, the Democrats seem to be building up to a position from which they can send a message to future toadies: Pam Bondi might be spared in the end, but not before we make her life hell.

At this point, you have probably heard enough about the effect of Bad Bunny’s Superbowl halftime show on the president and his coalition. While there are plenty of details to debate, including the ludicrous allegation that the Grammy-winner’s performance was “pure smut,” I think it’s important to keep your eyes fixed on what’s really at stake.

Rightwingers don’t mind “indecent acts,” as their protection of “the Epstein class” should attest. What they mind is a global superstar, whose originates from Puerto Rico and whose native language is Spanish, making affirmative claims about who belongs in America.

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was an extension of remarks he made two weekends ago after winning six Grammys. “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.”

His argument in favor of kindness and common cause, and in defense of diversity and inclusion, was later immortalized on words written on a football – “Together, we are America” – and it lay beneath a spectacle seen by 135 million, according to the Daily News.

The strength of Bad Bunny’s argument was enhanced by the impotence of its counterpart. The Turning Point USA, the hate group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, organized an alternate musical event. Emceed by Kid Rock, the show’s message was, more or less, America is for “us,” not “them.” And, according to the Daily News, just 6 million people watched it.

That’s their beef.

Donald Trump and his rightwing allies will not believe their vision of America – essentially, a racially exclusive club – is unpopular. And when I say “will not believe,” I am strictly speaking.

They will never accept that America has fallen in love with a man who was born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who was bagging groceries a decade ago before rising to Spotify’s top global artist, who welcomes everyone and whose life embodies the American Dream.

So they smear him, accusing him of involvement in a criminal conspiracy to somehow force Americans into loving him against their will. That’s the thinking behind a new complaint by US Congressman Andy Ogles. The Tennessee Republican described the Superbowl halftime show as "pure smut" featuring "explicit displays of gay sexual acts, women gyrating provocatively, and Bad Bunny shamelessly grabbing his crotch while dry-humping the air."

Ogles continued, saying Bad Bunny "openly glorified sodomy and countless other unspeakable depravities." Ogles said "these flagrant, indecent acts" break federal law regulating television airwaves. He called for an investigation in a letter to the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees broadcast regulations.

But such allegations are decoys. Rightwingers do not care about “family values.” If they did, they would not tolerate the incarceration of babies. (The youngest person in the Dilley Detention Center in Texas is 2 months old, according to Univision.) Rightwingers do not care about higher-order things, only whether they can be used to accomplish their goals.

In this case, the goal is discrediting a global superstar who is popularizing a new and dangerous idea of belonging in America. You don’t need to pass a test. You don’t have to know the rules. You don’t even need the correct paperwork. If you’re here, you’re American.

Because “together, we are America.”

“Together, we are America” is new, as it casts immigration in the context of brotherhood, so the burden of government is finding ways of turning a fact of life into a fact of law.

It is dangerous, as it upends a decade of rightwing effort to move public understanding of immigration away from a matter of freedom and opportunity to a matter of crime and punishment. The burden is now entirely on individuals. They’re presumed guilty until proven innocent. “Together, we are America” has the potential of turning that around.

Bad Bunny’s ethic of belonging is dangerous for another reason. It comes as the logical conclusion to ten years of fear-mongering and hate speech is coming into view: families ripped apart, communities shredded, citizens murdered and concentration camps opening.

Even respectable white people, or “independent voters,” are recoiling (mostly because they are shocked to learn that an “immigration crackdown” includes them). Thanks to the horrors the country has witnessed over the last month, they are now open to alternatives, especially alternatives being advanced by the most popular performing artist on the planet.

Right now, the focus is on ICE and its crimes. That, however, is like the allegation that Bad Bunny’s show was “pure smut” – it limits politics to terms favorable to Trump. “Abolish ICE” should be part of a bigger picture so the meaning of belonging is radically redefined.

Immigrants are Americans. They might not speak the language. They might not know the rules. They might not have the right papers. But they are here. That makes them American.

The question is not if they are, but when it becomes official.

A lot of attention has been given to Hakeem Jeffries recently on account of him dropping the f-bomb. In reaction to the president reposting a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, the House minority leader, in his own video, said “f--- Donald Trump.”

I think it’s worth asking why Jeffries did that beyond the usual explanations. The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s video was so disgustingly racist that Jeffries was expressing an appropriate level of emotion in calling on his Republican colleagues to condemn it.

But while emotion would explain the reaction of a normal person, Hakeem Jeffries is anything but. He’s a party leader in the United States Congress. As such, emotional reactions are typically taboo. For him to say “f---- Donald Trump,” something in the political landscape must have changed so that saying it is not only OK, but good for his party.

What has changed? Consider the following example of Trump’s behavior since ICE and Border Patrol killed two middle-class white people in Minneapolis. Referring to Alex Pretti and Renee Good in an interview, he said: “He was not an angel and she was not an angel.”

When I heard the president say that, I immediately thought of a Times article published in 2014 reflecting on a white police officer killing Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Times reporter accepted as true propaganda provided by the Ferguson police department pushing the view that the 18 year old was somehow deserving of his death.

“[Brown] lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” the Times reporter said. “He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.”

In addition to Brown stealing a box of cigars, the above details were enough for the Times reporter to conclude that he “was no angel.”

What was done to Brown was done in accordance with what you might call the rules of white power – the law should protect inpeople (in this case, a white cop) and punish outpeople (in this case, a Black man). That he did nothing to deserve death by the state is incidental to enforcing the rules of white power. Michael Brown was already seen as guilty. Smearing him was merely an effort to prove “the truth” after the fact.

After Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE and Border Patrol, respectively, they were smeared the same way that Michael Brown was, all in an effort by the regime to justify their deaths by the state. The difference, obviously, is that they aren’t outpeople. Anti-Black racism was never supposed to be directed at them. Donald Trump may be the paragon of the white-power social order, but he’s breaking the rules.

And white people don’t like it.

According to a poll released February 4, Trump’s approval rating dropped 11 points over the last month. Just 41 percent approve, with 57 percent disapproving (an increase of 12 points). This poll is important to note because it’s Rasmussen. The most Trump-friendly poll, Rasmussen tends to reflect the views of America’s white majority. Forty-one percent in Rasmussen is like 31 percent in a more legitimate poll.

I think implicit in such polling is a concern white people have rarely if ever had before – whether their own police departments will shield them from the same violence that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Occasionally, a viral video will show state and local cops doing what’s expected, but those seem to be overwhelmed by the number of videos showing state and local cops appearing to take the side of the regime.

Compounding matters is a largely unknown effort by the Trump regime to co-opt state and local law enforcement. Called “Task Force Model,” the program pays salaries and benefits to state and local cops who aid ICE and Border Patrol. During an appearance on MS Now, Matt Lewis said the arrangement could be detrimental to the midterms. His larger point, however, is “the person who pays you becomes your boss.”

It is an article of faith among respectable white people (the term I prefer) that state and local police departments are there to serve and protect everyone. This faith is rarely shaken, even when white cops kill Black men. Indeed, such moments usually serve to deepen that faith.

The only way imaginable to undermine that trust would be if the institutions of law enforcement started treating respectable white people the same way they have historically treated everyone else – in other words, if inpeople no longer receive the unconditional protection of the law and are instead punished the way outpeople have been.

I wouldn’t say that faith has been shaken, but Trump is creating potential for it by wedging two camps no one imagined could be wedged. In doing so, I think he risks white power backfiring on him. Not because respectable white people will become anti-racists, but because they are unlikely to tolerate being treated like Black people.

That’s what’s changed. That’s why someone like Hakeem Jeffries, a Democratic leader whose job depends on his skill in finding the middle of the middle of the road, a man who was until last month focused on affordability and nothing else, suddenly has the confidence to cuss out Trump. He believes he’s speaking with the blessing of a new majority.

He probably is, but don’t be fooled as to why. It’s not because Trump has “lost the culture.” It’s not because he has “lost the country.” Those are euphemisms for a backlash among respectable white people to a president whose authoritarian impulses did not stop at the color line, as they were supposed to, according to the rules of white power.

Lots of white people are, at best, indifferent to anti-Black politics. They want to be seen as “above politics,” because that’s what makes them “respectable.” However, that indifference melts into the air when anti-Black politics is directed at them. The shock of that kind of immorality and injustice is enough to turn them into revolutionaries.